Introducing Unleash your Rrrr – make car sounds just like when you were a kid and the Golf R magically reacts. Make screeching sounds and the Golf R drifts. Roar and it accelerates. Every sound you unleash triggers a different maneuver.

Unleash Your Rrrr reminds people what they loved about driving as kids, letting them relive those moments by making the sounds they made growing up. We created an interactive experience using a custom-built artificial intelligence engine that generates a personalized Golf R film using only a person’s voice. Previously, AI platforms like Siri could only understand human language. We changed that by building an AI engine that could interpret the sounds of acceleration, drifting, and braking, match them to the right car maneuver, and stitch together a unique, sharable film of the Golf R on a track.

microsite reminds people that everyday driving can be fun again. It starts with a cinematic intro video of Police Academy star and king of sound effects Michael Winslow, showcasing how to Unleash Your Rrrr.

Unleash Your Rrrr brakes away from traditional point and click interfaces to create an intuitive, visceral experience. Fans take control of the virtual Golf R with their imaginations by roaring, screeching, and growling. If they screech - the Golf R drifts. Roar and it accelerates. Every sound they made triggered a different maneuver, all resulting in a hilarious, personalized, shareable video. In addition, a colorful data visualization lets them see how the AI brain translated the their sounds.

As a halo for Volkswagen performance, Unleash Your Rrr exceeded all expectations. More than 200 publishers worldwide wrote about the experience, generating nearly 30MM impressions for the brand and accounting for over $1MM in earned media. The first 500 vehicles available sold out in under nine hours, and the rest of the inventory sold out completely over the next month.

On Facebook and Twitter, over a quarter of our targeted audience, 5MM+, watched our campaign video. The popularity of the film resulted in a click through rate to the microsite that was 35X times higher than average, and time spent on the Unleash Your Rrr microsite was over 4 minutes.

Volkswagen needed to democratize performance and remind everyone that they make driving fun for everyone. Golf R is a niche car with a hardcore fanbase. They talk about it all the time. They love its understated, refined design. That it sneaks up on you, and you only notice it when the engine opens up with that distinctive roar and throttles past. Sound was our insight.

Everyone grew up racing. Hot Wheels on table tops. Our friends in the back yard. Or on bikes down the street. And at every turn, we were making driving sounds. Our imaginations turned our roaring into turbo-charged engines. But as we grow up, driving becomes more functional and less fun. So we went back to when we had the most fun with cars--as kids, imagining ourselves as racecar drivers.

Volkswagen needed to launch the Golf R, its top performance model designed to bring back the fun in everyday driving. Today the visceral thrill of being behind the wheel of a high-performance car has been replaced by the mundane distractions of social media and demands of the everyday.

Volkswagen has always been a driver’s brand that makes cars for people who love being behind the wheel. And for driving enthusiasts, the Golf R is the symbol of ultimate Volkswagen performance in the U.S. And to launch the all-new Golf R, Volkswagen needed to rekindle our love of speed, turn this enthusiast car into a performance halo for the entire brand, and remind drivers that everyday driving could still be thrilling.