The launch of the new Mercedes-Benz-User-Experience (MBUX) caused quite a stir in the automotive industry. For the first time, drivers were able to control various functions inside the cockpits of new Mercedes models via swipe, touch and (thanks to their very own voice assistant) with their voice – intuitively and easy: radio and entertainment, information like weather and navigation system amongst others.

Within the industry, trade press and brands were impressed by this fresh way of interacting with your car – but how do we get our target audience of technology-affine car enthusiasts to appreciate it the same way?

To let future car buyers experience Mercedes’ innovative in-car-experience we needed to deliver a foretaste at scale and drive engagement. But convincing people for a test drive is tough and expensive. So, how do we get them in touch with the Mercedes experience without putting them into a real car?

Our strategy needed to provide two things:

1) A communication channel to reach people that are interested in high quality cars and love technology

2) An environment in which our target audience naturally uses swipe, touch and their voice to interact with technology – the features that make the MBUX so innovative

In Germany, mobile answers to both:

4 out of 5 Germans own a smartphone. They are used to swipe and touch – and the smartphone is the #1 touchpoint for voice interactions. It is literally a cockpit in your pocket!

So, to bring the MBUX experience to life in advertising with a seamless user experience, the solution was quite simple: embed it with all its features into German smartphones… by launching the world's first mobile ad that does not only react to swipe and touch but that can be controlled by the users’ voice!

The immersive mobile ad introduced smartphone users to a brand-new Mercedes-Benz and put them into the drivers’ seat - ready to engage and experience the features of the MBUX!

It enabled our target audience to playfully control a Mercedes-Benz cockpit with all the interactions they love about their smartphone: swiping to adjust the seat-position, a simple touch to turn on the engine and voice command to bring the new Mercedes-Benz voice assistant to life. To emphasize a useful experience, we included the most used German voice commands. For example, the user could ask the ad to show the weather and the display inside the Mercedes cockpit reacted accordingly, showing the weather. The ad was then programmatically served to German smartphone users, targeting a predominantly male target group with a high income, interest in cars & technology and a high quality lifestyle (ensuring a focus on voice assistant and Mercedes-Benz-affine consumers).

Over 18% total interaction rate with the ad; that’s one in five users getting immersed into the experience!

-The voice-interaction rate of a whopping 8,4% proves the effectiveness of our approach

- 1,3% of users clicked to get more info after experiencing the MBUX; that is a massive result considering an average clickrate of 0,2% for mobile campaigns in Germany

- An average of 10 seconds spent with the experience (that’s more than twice the benchmark of "regular" interactive ads) shows that our target audience is in fact willing to try new ways of voice interaction - when presented the right way

- It was efficient, too: the equivalent of getting the total of MBUX testers to have a real foretaste of the experience in a real car sums up to 10 million euro (assuming an industry average of 200 EUR cost per lead)! Not bad for a mobile campaign