The agency designed and developed a fully-functioning Hoverboard. We then filmed it being put through its paces on a specially designed Hoverpark and released this film online

In designing the Hoverboard we were inspired by skate culture and Lexus design principles.

The Hoverboard incorporates materials and design features that appear in every Lexus, including bamboo, carbon-fibre and the Lexus Spindle Grille shape.

It hovers due to the ‘Meissner Effect’, which governs the relationship between magnetic fields and superconductors; these were built into the bottom of our Hoverboard.

We collaborated with scientists and traditional skatepark designers to construct our own custom Hoverpark. Construction took a team of fifty crew over two months, with the scientists, Hoverboard rider and production company performing daily tests.

The look of the finished Hoverpark was immediately recognizable from the world of skating whilst housing thousands of magnets, positioned and angled exactly to enable the board to perform as you see it in the film.

To date the campaign has received over 40 million views, over 30,000 pieces of media coverage and an estimated PR value of $64m.

Lexus wanted to engage with a global influencer audience but didn’t have their attention and were outspent by the German luxury automotive brands.

To connect with that audience, the agency needed to do something to out-smart the competition with next to no media budget. Every view, every comment and every share had to be organic and earned, not paid for.

Our idea had to be something that would influence the influencers.

Lexus is a global luxury car brand, a challenger in the category against Audi, Mercedes and BMW.

The Lexus brand is better known for its engineering credentials than for its imagination or creativity; our brief was to change this perception and get people talking about Lexus by demonstrating a side of the brand that hadn’t been seen before.