Vauxhall, part of the Opel family and owned by General Motors, has been manufacturing and selling vehicles in the UK since 1903. It’s been a British favourite since first hitting the road, and the Corsa and Astra models are still among the UK’s biggest selling cars.

The Corsa is an important product in Vauxhall’s range, in the hugely competitive small car market. But even market leaders and heritage brands have a constant challenge to remain relevant.

In 2015 Vauxhall launched the Corsa’s latest iteration, packed with innovative technology and features that you wouldn’t expect to find in a car at its price-point, including Advanced Park Assist, OnStar personal on-board assistant with up to seven WiFi hotspots, automatic crash response and vehicle diagnostics, and Apple CarPlay.

Vauxhall asked us to develop complementary social media activity to engage young drivers.

Our KPIs were to achieve 2.8% engagement and a 2.3% click-through rate.

We put our canine talent, a boxer called Gerty, in the driving seat of a Corsa on a London high street. Using hidden cameras, we filmed her parallel parking the car (or rather, the car parking itself) and the amazed reactions of onlookers.

We turned the footage into a 58-second film, #ParallelBarking, and captured shorter pieces of footage, stills and GIFs.

A teaser film of a paw pulling the Corsa’s car keys off a table was posted on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram a few days before we went live. We launched the hero film across social channels on 21 March, supported with paid media.

We shared further content by allowing “Gerty” to take over Vauxhall’s social channels. She became a social star, allowing us to extend the campaign by highlighting other features of the Corsa (eg Apple CarPlay by sharing playlists, and the “bark activated” On-Star system).