Most of us can relate to the image of kids looking outside the car window letting their mind wander into imaginary worlds as they travel along the road. But in most family cars today children are sucked into screens, disconnected from what surrounds them. Snelweg Sprookjes are location-based audiobooks that transform ordinary highways into magical tales. A good alternative for the use of screens on the backseat. We transform car rides into unique experiences that react to the surroundings, transforming ordinary road objects into magical characters of a story, using only audio. Turning every car ride into a story.

Volkswagen has been the leading car brand in the Dutch automotive market for the past decades. With their broad range of different models, Volkswagen can be seen as a true family car brand. Instead of Volkswagen’s traditional brand campaigns, the brand chose a more business-oriented campaign in 2018. To maintain scores on important brand values (and have an impact outside of the mid-funnel), Volkswagen asked us to create an idea that drives brand sympathy among families, in an innovative way.

Road Tales are location-based audiobooks that transform ordinary highways into magical tales. Road objects like windmills, bridges and lakes are turned into story elements. Parents can download the app and play the interactive stories through the car’s sound system and then put the phone away. 5000 kilometers of high-way were scanned to create a personalised experience for every ride. The story engine uses custom storylines for every object along the road. We have identified and tagged over 8042 objects, divided over: Farm, Chimney, Water tower, Bridge, Communication tower, Tunnel, Lake / canal / etc.

We worked with award-winning children’s book writers to make the experience feel both innovative ánd handcrafted. This way, we made sure the app felt more like magic than just a smart tech system. And that's crucial if you want to grab kids’ undivided attention. Volkswagen turns every car ride into a story.

When looking into typical car-related behavior amongst families, we quickly found that there’s an interesting tension around the use of screens in the average backseat. We know parents tend to use screens to keep their kids quiet: 76 percent of parents with children aged 3 to 16 say their child is typically on a device or watching digital media on car trips.

Most parents do feel guilty about this though, as nearly all parents - 95 percent - consider family drives the perfect time for bonding and view them as an opportunity to get their kids to open up. Furthermore, research has shown that frequent screen exposure decreases kids’ imagination, which can have negative long-term effects.

We therefore aimed to create an experience that addressed all of these issues: (1) decrease screen usage in the car, (2) stimulate imagination based on your surroundings and (3) facilitate interaction within the car.

Road Tales is an app that can be downloaded from both the App Store and the Google Play store. Our campaign was aimed at creating awareness for Road Tales and encouraging parents to download the app. It consists of a social campaign, influencer strategy, and online video. Moreover, word of mouth amongst befriended parents (based on their positive experiences with the app) proved to be a strong and relevant driver for the campaign.

To make the story stick, we made car-stickers of the characters that were given to schools and were handed out at dealerships. Because in the end, there’s no better way to keep the stories alive than stickering ‘your’ window with your favorite characters.

This project is still running. The first results look very promising:

- The Road Tales app reached the #1 position in the app store’s book category within 3 days. It has currently been downloaded 13,300 times.

- The number of unique users currently totals 12,902. On average, they have each played 3.8 stories (out of the 4 stories currently available).

- People have, together, been listening to Road Tales for more than 10,000 hours, which equals 130,000 kilometers of highway driving or 32 laps around planet earth. This is the time that otherwise would have been spent behind screens.

However, the biggest compliment we got is parents asking for more stories, as with Road Tales they don’t feel the need to hand out screens for every ride anymore: screentime became storytime, and thus quality time. We're therefore researching the possibilities of a sequel, like adding new stories to the app.