The launch of campaign coincided with Canada’s largest auto-show, a time of year when auto-makers compete to capture the attention of new car shoppers and Mazda knew they had the perfect vehicle to accomplish this. The MX-5 RF is an eye-catching roadster that was sure to turn heads. So we created a billboard with an innovative combination of crowd detection and facial recognition technology that kept track of all the heads that turned to look at our ad featuring the car.

This execution required a lot of restraint and respect for our audience walking by it. A complicated message wouldn’t cut it in a busy underground concourse with lots of traffic so we kept fine tuning the headline and the idea until it was as short as possible while still delivering the intended message. To bring this idea to life the video wall required a custom, industrial grade computer upgrade that could process high frame rate video while rendering dynamic data in real-time. The audience engagement calculation for this execution was powered by open-source and custom software which used anonymized data from the environment in order to update the creative on the fly.

- Over 130,000 heads were turned in the 4 weeks of the campaign.

- The billboard was featured on the front page of AdWeek, and in Canada’s National Newspaper The Globe & Mail.

- The Discovery Channel filmed a segment on the billboard for their Daily Planet show.

- The billboard generated more than 7 million earned media impressions.

Data gathering, target audience, relevance, approach

The location of our message was key as we wanted to ensure our media placement would garner as many turned heads as possible from our discerning target. So we opted for a video wall in the heart of Toronto’s financial district which guaranteed hundreds of thousands of potential Mazda owners would see it. The video wall was conveniently close to the location of the auto-show so passers-by could check it out in person within minutes of seeing our ad.

In a few short years Mazda has redefined their product offering by crafting a number of premium vehicles throughout their lineup. As a result, their target has evolved into a more well-heeled crowd. So when Mazda was looking to feature their newest nameplate (the MX-5 RF) as part of an out-of-home campaign we knew we had to create something as innovative and engaging as the vehicle itself.