Alpine F1 Team wanted to reward its fans who prove their support all year long.

In order to do so, Alpine not only designed Coded Tweets for fans, but also made them part of the operation.

We relied on the team’s #1 influencers, their drivers (Fernando Alonso & Esteban Ocon), and on F1 Fans #1 social media platform, Twitter, to convey this activation, with engagement at the core.

The more fans would engage, the quicker they would reveal Fernando’s contract extension.

In the last two decades, Formula 1 has changed a lot with new teams, new faces, new motors, and new fans.

However someone has not changed: Fernando Alonso.

With more than 20 years of racing and two world championship titles, he is a legend and one of the most influential figure in the motorsport industry.

To announce his contract extension, Alpine wanted to do something more engaging than a traditional press release.

Actually, fans of Alpine had been waiting for this announcement, and we had to do something which was engaging and worth the wait.

Moreover, Alonso deserves something special for a driver of his status. After all this years of racing, he is one of the most famous and engaging drivers in the paddock. So, fans should not be disappointed with a “classical” contract extension announcement.

In Twitter’s history, misspelled “pocket” tweets (you know, those tweets you accidentally publish when your mobile phone is on in your jeans…) published by celebrities became viral (you probably remember COVFEFE, don’t you?)

On purpose, we decided to write gibberish tweets from Alonso’s and his teammate's account.

In fact, these tweets had a secret meaning... We encrypted the tweets and let the confusion prompt fans to decrypt them and discover the news, all through a conversation between Alonso, Ocon and Alpine.

Fans had to decode the tweets to reveal its content.

Moreover, content would be very important as it was a sneak preview of Alonso’s contract extension announcement. This way, the fans that decoded the tweets would directly announce major news for Alpine and for Formula 1!

Since the rise of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive”, the Formula 1 fan base has enlarged to younger audiences, very active on social media, and F1 fans are looking for a fun coverage of their favorite sports. They are especially very much engaged on Twitter, where they comment every single fact about their favorite sport, teams and drivers.

We then targeted not only Alonso’s and Alpine F1 Team’s fans, but the whole Formula 1 community.

Among the most engaging tweets ever, there are famous typing mistakes like “Covfefe” from Donald Trump, or “jhjhh’/” from Kim Kardashian. We then decided to create such a non understandable tweet to tease Fernando Alonso’s contract extension, and to make it viral through a coded conversation with his teammate, Esteban Ocon.

It was our goal that fans, as engaged as they are, would dive into it and try to decipher the code by all means.

On August 25 2021, at 10.18am, Fernando Alonso released on his Twitter account the first coded tweet, soon followed by his teammate Esteban Ocon who responded his tweet 15 minutes later. Eventually, Fernando would issue a new tweet to answer Ocon’s, leading to three tweets being published in 30 minutes.

Fans from all over the world then went crazy. First, they wondered what happened and thought it was a “pocket tweet” from Alonso. But when Ocon answered, it became obvious it was some sort of code. Fans then tried to find the solution, with @jorge_fdez10, from Madrid, being the first to eventually decipher the code, 5 minutes after the last tweet. The news about Fernando Alonso’s contract extension eventually went global, first on Twitter, and then on major sports & general news networks. The news was then confirmed by an official tweet and video issued by Alpine.

The three tweets from Alonso and Ocon led to 10% of all Alpine mentions on social media in 2021, while Alpine F1 Team itself tweeted 3,114 times throughout the year!

Tweets reached 220% higher visibility and 45% higher engagement rate than the other tweets in average, leading fans to have direct conversations with the brand.

But most of all, those mysterious tweets, and eventually Fernando Alonso’s contract extension being uncovered by fans, made the news all over the world with stories from the BBC, ESPN, Sky, L’Equipe, Marca, Eurosport, El Pais, Der Spiegel, Reuters, the Times of India…

And all this with €0 spent in media buying!