The average 8 year-old boy in the US owns 45 Hot Wheels cars. To grow the business, Hot Wheels had to evolve from toys to a more entertainment-focused brand.The campaign was created around the idea of 'Hot Wheels For Real'.To punctuate the campaign, and legitimise Hot Wheels in the eyes of an older audience that had grown out of toys, a life-sized version of a toy was built and other media was activated around the event then pushed online through social media to garner a massive new audience for the brand, from which future communication could be targeted.

The promotion, which played out over 2 months and peaked on May 29, 2011 around the Indy 500, garnered over 1.7bn media impressions, attracted over 40m viewings of the content and brought in over 200,000 new Facebook fans (most of which were from a demographic that had grown out of Hot Wheels).The campaign earned a world record, created a real team of stunt drivers, attracted new licensed brand partnerships, inspired a new range of Hot Wheels products and was instrumental in attracting one of the world's leading film studios to sign up for a blockbuster Hollywood movie.

An extensive online media campaign showed teaser content of a secret driver training for a world record jump, based on a real-life version of a Hot Wheels toy.Live at the Indianapolis 500, Hot Wheels and the 'Yellow Driver' broke the world record for a vehicle jump in front of 300,000 people. The jump was then edited in real-time and dropped into a 30 minute TV show on one of USA's major TV networks and at the end of the show, as the driver was to be revealed, the audience was pushed to Facebook, where his identity was revealed.

By launching the campaign around a live event and activating multiple avenues of media around it the Hot Wheels For Real campaign was able to successfully target and communicate with a new, far broader audience that the brand had before. It helped Hot Wheels be seen as, not a kid’s toy brand, but a brand for boys of ALL ages.