City living is synonymous with fun, freedom and adventure. Unfortunately for this increasingly Uber-dependent generation, driving runs the risk of slowly evolving into an unproductive chore.

We had to build desire with this audience for an established car that is synonymous with safety. The Polo needs to be an essential element to city living for our younger demographic and demonstrate that the it will add to the fun, freedom and adventure of all while making safety seem relevant and appealing.

The campaign needed to showcase the advanced safety features that makes the Polo one of Volkswagens most iconic cars, and introduce it to a new generation of motorists.

The Volkswagen Polo is packed with safety tech. And while this safety tech doesn’t excite our younger audience, it does help them fail less.

So we found a way into their social feeds by creating a fail video, that looked like it had been spontaneously shot on an outdated iphone. Only this fail video…had no fail. Instead, our safety tech saved the day. We used a strategic seeding process to leak an unbranded version of this video online to viral sites and meme pages – letting it do its thing in the viral universe.

Several million views and dozens of international publications later, we retargeted the same audience with a branded version of the video, strategically revealing the cheeky caper to potential Polo customers.

We know that younger car buyers don’t pay much attention to traditional advertising. But, like the rest of us, they do love viral videos and internet culture. Why not use the second as an avenue for the first?

Our goal was to create an “ad” that seamlessly integrated itself into today’s viral culture, showcasing our product in a genuinely entertaining way that was indistinguishable from any other viral video. A fail video in which the safety tech actually removed the fail.

We would use that video as a trojan horse, so to speak, into millennial’s social feeds, retargeting them with more information about this cheeky ad – and helping them realize how relevant this safety tech could actually be to their life.

We spent days ensuring our video looked like any other user-generated viral video shot on an outdated smartphone – from orientation to scaled-back quality – perfectly tailored for people’s mobile feeds.

Next, we had to leak it online. We needed a real person with a fitting Instagram feed: @jstrakertroublemaker. Acting like he had filmed it, we executed a strategic viral seeding strategy, sharing the video with a custom database of mobile-first viral sites and meme pages.

The views racked up immediately, across websites, YouTube videos and TV shows. We tracked them all, waiting until the video’s popularity had reached its peak.

Then, we implemented a retargeting strategy that identified promising leads who had viewed the video, and followed it up with a branded version that appeared in their Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat feeds.

Planning began in 2017, while the creative execution began in July 2018. We launched the video in August 2018.

The result was 147.6 million views (and rising), with $17.8 million in earned media. All leading to a record 11.8% increase in market share – smashing the intended business goals. The Polo Unfail campaign also had a targeted brand lift study associated with it, which produced hugely favourable results for the Volkswagen brand and Polo as an individual model. This included 5.3% lift in Awareness, a 4.2% increase in safety association and a 5.9% increase in affinity and brand perception. The campaign also increased unique visitors to the Volkswagen homepage recording a 9.4% lift.