The new Audi R8 is an intense sports car. It pushes the human body to the extreme. In fact, it test drives the driver. To bring this thought to life, we measured the heart rate, oxygen intake and pupil dilation of drivers as they put the R8 through it's paces around a race track. We then commissioned world famous artists to turn the data into stunning, physical art installations for a series of press, outdoor and digital executions.

The Audi R8 is an intense sports car. Pushing the human body to the extreme, it test drives the driver. To bring this thought to life, we measured drivers’ heart rates and pupil dilation as they put the R8 through its paces around a racetrack.

We then commissioned world famous artists to turn the R8 showroom into an art exhibition. Created by Onishi Yasuaki, the Heartbeat (measuring 8m length x 4.5m height x 3m depth) was designed from plastic sheeting and hot-glue, lit up by a suspended red light scanning the installation, representing a heartbeat.

Sébastien Preschoux, the artist behind the Eye sculpture (measuring 11m length x 6.5m height x 4m depth) made out wood and woven by hundreds of meters of 16 shades of blue and white thread.

Finally a photographer who behaves like an artist, Benedict Redgrove, bringing the scenes to life purely on camera.

The R8 is important for its role as the spearhead of the brand. Aside from selling cars, R8 campaigns have some of the most dramatic effect on how the brand is perceived. So too with this launch, where the aim was to make the Audi brand feel more exciting, premium and stylish - and it delivered. Looking at the results this work showed a direct and significant increase in people’s perceptions of the brand as stylish, sophisticated and modern. And that’s aside from bringing in over £10 million worth of sales.

You don’t buy an R8 just to get from A to B. It needs to get your heart racing and pupils dilating. The easy way to do that? Sell it on speed. However, UK advertising regulations ban anything that glamorises speed. So we needed to find a way to sell the feeling of being in an R8. Luckily, Audi had spent years intensely engineering all sorts of improvements that created a more intense feeling behind the wheel. It’s like the driver plugs their mind straight into the chassis and the car electrifies the senses in return. So our approach: make potential drivers of the R8 (predominantly wealthy older men) and everyone else (to life Audi’s general desirability) feel the purity and focus of what it’s like to be behind the wheel of the new R8.

The R8 was Audi's first-ever supercar – and a massive success over its first 8 years. Our task was to launch the newly remastered R8 and cast a powerful halo across the rest of the brand. The R8 press and OOH campaign ran in the UK. OOH ran for 2 weeks in November, placed in 37 roadside locations, including full motion digital sites, in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham and Belfast. Press executions ran throughout the whole of November, in 34 publications including newspapers, magazines, monthly supplements and car magazines.