Cannes Lions

Volkswagen | Unleash Your Rrrr: Golf R Launch

DEUTSCH LA, Los Angeles / VOLKSWAGEN / 2016

Awards:

3 Shortlisted Cannes Lions
Presentation Image
Demo Film
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Overview

Entries

Credits

OVERVIEW

Description

Introducing Unleash your Rrrr – make car sounds just like when you were a kid and the Golf R magically reacts. Make screeching sounds and the Golf R drifts. Roar and it accelerates. Every sound you unleash triggers a different maneuver.

Unleash Your Rrrr reminds people what they loved about driving as kids, letting them relive those moments by making the sounds they made growing up. We created an interactive experience using a custom-built artificial intelligence engine that generates a personalized Golf R film using only a person’s voice. Previously, AI platforms like Siri could only understand human language. We changed that by building an AI engine that could interpret the sounds of acceleration, drifting, and braking, match them to the right car maneuver, and stitch together a unique, sharable film of the Golf R on a track.

Execution

Unleash Your Rrrr is the world’s first Artificial Intelligence brain that translates abstract sounds into a virtual test drive. The microsite reminds people that everyday driving can be fun again. It starts with a cinematic intro video of Police Academy star and king of sound effects Michael Winslow, showcasing how to Unleash Your Rrrr.

Unleash Your Rrrr brakes away from traditional point and click interfaces to create an intuitive, visceral experience. Fans take control of the virtual Golf R with their imaginations by roaring, screeching, and growling. If they screech - the Golf R drifts. Roar and it accelerates. Every sound they made triggered a different maneuver, all resulting in a hilarious, personalized, shareable video. In addition, a colorful data visualization lets them see how the AI brain translated the their sounds.

Outcome

As a halo for Volkswagen performance, Unleash Your Rrr exceeded all expectations. More than 200 publishers worldwide wrote about the experience, generating nearly 30MM impressions for the brand and accounting for over $1MM in earned media. The first 500 vehicles available sold out in under nine hours, and the rest of the inventory sold out completely over the next month.

On Facebook and Twitter, over a quarter of our targeted audience, 5MM+, watched our campaign video. The popularity of the film resulted in a click through rate to the microsite that was 35X times higher than average, and time spent on the Unleash Your Rrr microsite was over 4 minutes.

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