Acura has a proud tradition of making performance vehicles, always relentlessly centered on the driver experience. The Acura ILX might not have the biggest engine in its class, but it has something much better: the best power-to-weight ratio, which means the power output available to the driver is much better than that of the competition. That paired with ultraresponsive handling and Acura’s celebrated 8-speed Dual-Clutch transmission makes the car an extension of the driver, always instantly reacting to whatever you tell it to do—always incredibly quick to react. With the ILX redesigned for the 2019 model year, our task was to launch it to a digital-first, millennial audience with a campaign idea that reached them on the platforms and in the cultures relevant to them. To be successful, we needed to reach the target audience with an interactive idea that showed off the exhilarating performance of the 2019 Acura ILX.

Just like the car is relentlessly centered on instantly fulfilling the driver’s every intention, so is “Total Control,” an interactive video experience created not for the passive broadcast TV consumption of generations past but for active play on the device at the center of the Millennial universe: their phone.

The experience launches them into exhilarating performance footage of the Acura ILX. The footage is shot and edited for the vertical orientation of their phones and may at first look like a regular static car commercial. But then an on-screen prompt encourages them to rotate their phones. As they do, the ILX power-drifts right across the screen, reacting instantly to the physical interaction.

Through a series of physical interactions, the user explores every angle of the car as it slides, spins, slaloms, and even jumps across their screen in both vertical and horizontal aspect ratios.

Target demographics are 25-34-year-olds, $90K+ household income, and college educated. Our research shows that they’re ambitious, with 91 percent aspiring to one day become leaders. As many as 84 percent say they don’t trust traditional advertising, and 87% of them dislike the traditional car-buying experience. Almost half say they can’t live without their smartphones, and more than two-thirds use their smartphones to play mobile games.

In other words, they’re a Millennial audience coming into their own and experiencing success in their careers. They’re a generation of cord cutters and gamers who actively avoid car-dealers and traditional ads. Our opportunity with this audience is to create an experience they will seek out and actively participate in. And even though the audience likes games, the experience shouldn’t look like a game with CGI graphics, as this risks diluting the premium nature of the brand and product.

“Total Control” is an interactive video experience that instantly and without lag shows performance maneuvers that correspond to whatever physical interaction the user makes with their phone. To make this possible, we designed a system that seamlessly connects vertical and landscape video modes using a massive video grid containing every performance maneuver available to the user. We then constructed an algorithm that would detect the phone’s movement and instantly show the correct cell in the grid with no lag.

The exhilarating performance footage was captured in just one day of shooting on a closed course using a combination of pursuit vehicles, including one that allowed us to get within inches of the picture car at speeds of up to 50 mph. We completed more than 50 setups in one shoot day to have enough variation in footage to make every interactive test-drive unique.

The project was live from January 13 to March 10, 2019. The experience was made possible by using Facebook Instant Games, a new interactive platform accessed through Instagram or the Facebook or FB Messenger app on the user’s smartphone device. With this project, Acura became the first automotive brand to use the platform.

We saw very high engagement with this experience; on average, users spent 53 seconds with the interactive video and, in that time, completed an average of seven performance maneuvers with the vehicle. This means we got to show off the car’s best angles, as well as the full range of performance driving the vehicle is capable of. We had more than 1,000 daily active users for the campaign’s duration, and saw significant lifts in both favorability, familiarity and consideration among the target audience exposed to the campaign.