Branded content is viewed as a crucial part of an advertising campaign in the current US marketplace. The relationship between brands and entertainment has evolved from “product placement” to truly integrating the brand into entertainment assets or creating content other than commercials where the product can play an important or character role in the finished production.

Insight:

When most Americans shop for fuel-efficient vehicles today, they tend to think about hybrids – not diesels. And that’s because most Americans have outdated notions about diesel engines, notions that keep diesel vehicles out of their consideration set. They still think of diesel as dirty, stinky, loud, sluggish and inefficient.

Strategy:

Increase consideration for Volkswagen diesel vehicles by debunking outdated and inaccurate myths about diesel fuel, engines and vehicles.

Execution:

But these aren’t just any old wives – they happen to be the Three Golden Sisters – Internet famous for reviewing pop-culture trends like Kim Kardashian’s sex tape. We also partnered with social influencers Tanner Foust and Tuna the Dog (the Internet’s most famous ugly dog) to tell our myth-busting story across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Unique, looping versions of the videos were created for Instagram. A Tumblr page served as the hub to tell the entire myth-busting story. The videos were also part of a larger paid-media buy during Turner’s March Madness live stream.

We partnered with social influencers the Three Golden Sisters, Tanner Foust and Tuna the Dog (aka Tunameltsmyheart) to tell our myth-busting story across social platforms. We leveraged these influential personalities to draw an audience beyond typical VW fans. We also created content specific to each platform, including unique looping videos for Instagram. Tuna even got his own edit of the episode, where he was the star. When fans quoted funny lines, we turned them into real-time GIFs on Tumblr. And the untraditional approach proved so successful that it’s leading Volkswagen’s social strategy moving forward.

• In the first 3 weeks, there was a 50% increase in brand mentions related to TDI, fuel efficiency and diesel compared to January, and a 99% increase over average conversation for the brand.

• The campaign garnered over 173 million impressions and over 16.2 million video views.

• On vw.com, there was a 13% lift in TDI configurations between Feb-Mar 2014 to Feb-Mar 2015. We saw a 35% increase in total TDI-related configurations per daily unique visitor.

• Compared to just before the campaign, VW gained an additional 6.3 points share of the market of all diesel sales.

VW needed to disprove pervasive diesel myths that have prevented Americans from considering diesel. And with six real myths to tackle and a limited budget, traditional advertising wasn’t going to cut it. If were going to educate Americans about diesel, we needed to go a bit off-script on this one.

And boy did we. We partnered with the “Three Golden Sisters” (Internet famous for commenting on Kim Kardashian’s sex tape), pro racer Tanner Foust and Tuna the Dog (just the most lovable ugly dog on the Internet) to create an episodic series where old wives debunked old wives’ tales about diesel.

By forgoing the use of traditional scripts, we were able to capture their humorous antics and create even more social content. In the end, we produced six videos and dozens of pieces of social content for our audience. And the response was overwhelming. Even VW dealers couldn’t get enough of the old wives, sharing the entire series on their social channels.