Volkswagen was a European wide sponsor of the Euro 2020 championships.

Our brief was to ensure engagement on social with the official and unofficial content generated throughout the tournament, with understandably tight restrictions from both the brand and the event on what was possible.

When the small remote control car drove onto the pitch for the first match our social listening pick up on the excitement.

Problem was he wasn't set to reappear until the final match.

Our objective was generate enough excitement and conversation around this little ID.4 to capitalise on his return and allow the brand to reach a new audience beyond football or car enthusiasts

A digital Herbie for the next generation. We worked quickly to create an engaging tone for Tiny’s cute, yet bold persona that was likable and relatable. Creating a unique voice would also allow us to start commenting on topical events outside of sport.

Tiny’s following started to grow and our audience were delighted to discover that he had a voice, an opinion and even a blue tick! It was clear that the little car’s big personality was cutting through for Volkswagen – a breath of fresh air amongst the generic messaging of the car industry.

Tiny also aligned perfectly with Volkswagen’s Way to Zero messaging, becoming a champion of sustainability, Electric Vehicles, and even charging at Tesco Pod points.

Maintaining engagement during his down time was key – working directly with UEFA, we secured all available footage of Tiny in action and started serving snippets to the fans along with charismatic and engaging copy.

Our strategy was to retweeted his fans, engaged players and encourage mentions in mainstream media from the likes of BBC Radio DJ Greg James, The Huffington Post, The Independent, The Sun, The Guardian and Pink News.

Through this strategy he even made it into a sketch on BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers.

Tiny would reflect on his show stopping appearance with Tweets that caused our engagement rate to soar. The earliest peak was at 19.6% for a single Tweet.

Tiny landed in the UK on 5 July. Despite huge security restrictions surrounding the tournament, we secured accreditation, sneaked onto the pitch with our cameras to capture fresh content of Tiny warming up for his next performance.

A perfectly timed tweet announcing Tiny’s return was published during the National Anthems of the first Semi-Final. Minutes later he made his entrance onto the pitch. Engagement soared. “THE CAR IS BACK” trended on Twitter. That single tweet received over 2.7 million impressions and 279.5k engagements with zero media support.

A team of three social media managers then live-tweeted through both semi-finals, engaging with fans, publishing behind-the-scenes content and providing real time commentary to the events on the pitch.

For the Final Tiny delivered the ball to Wembley’s centre spot wearing a brand-new rainbow strip in tribute to Pride and LGBTQ+. The crowd went wild at the hero’s return, both on and offline.

Social listening tool, Pulsar revealed that Tiny had dominated social media conversations over the weekend, in the build-up to and during the final.

Throughout the tournament he’d gained 18.7k Twitter followers, made 15.9m impressions and had 8.3k mentions on Twitter alone.

Tiny’s average Twitter engagement rate was 3.5%, that’s 2.5% higher than the @UKVolkswagen average for the same time period.

He was a hit on TikTok too, gaining 1.9m likes, 24.5m views, 20.6k shares and 275k fans.

He generated 20 separate PR pieces across a 1.03B readership, with an estimated 1.35M coverage views

Total weekly visits to Volkswagen.co.uk increased by 14.5% during the tournament, whilst natural search increased by 42.5%. Overall, test drive requests increased by 50.2%. However, test drive requests for ID.3 increased by 92%, with half of all requests now being for EVs.