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Audi

Raising brand awareness

The German car manufacturer Audi has an association with one of theatre's most respected franchises - Cirque du Soleil. With Audi's newest vehicle's arrival on Australian shores coinciding with Cirque du Soleil's Australian tour of their new show, Audi's Australian marketing department designed an integrated digital campaign to capitalise on this association to help promote the new vehicle. The campaign involved a variety of targeted market interactions over multiple digital channels, all powered by Traction.

The campaign included two major components:

• A mobile competition
• A viral application

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Although these two components operated independently, they worked towards the common objective of raising brand awareness in Audi's Australian target market by starting new communications with potential customers. Essential for achieving this was a shared website directly integrated with a common customer database.

The mobile competition was incorporated into an on-site Audi promotion at the Quidam shows. Through this promotion the audience was informed of their opportunity to win an Audi for a weekend and Cirque du Soleil mobile content, including ring-tones and wallpapers. All they had to do was SMS their name and postcode to the supplied phone number to enter. Traction was configured to receive and process the SMS entries, reply with an appropriate SMS response, and add the person's name, postcode, and mobile phone number to the customer database.

Traction's mobile content management was used to manage the ring-tones and wallpapers sent as instant prizes, as well as allowing them to be downloaded from the website. Traction's advanced mobile functionality was further utilised by giving competition entrants the ability to book a 'test drive' or order a 'brochure' by responding to their notification SMS with the appropriate key words.

The major innovation of the campaign was the viral application that was both a group organiser and competition. The application, which was accessed via the website, provided visitors with functionality to organise a group of friends to attend the show, and the opportunity to win tickets for them and their friends in the process.

To utilise it, the user was required to enter their name and email address and the names and email addresses of each of their friends they wished to invite. The more friends they invited, the more chances they had of winning. Using Traction's Send 2 Friend mechanism, each friend was automatically sent an email invitation that provided buttons to instantly respond. Visitors were effectively inviting new visitors to the website, with the viral effect of exposing the site to a wealth of new potential customers and a greatly enlarged customer database.

Audi Australia will continue collecting names and contact details of people throughout Cirque du Soleil's year-long Australian tour. The resulting database of potential customers is hoped to yield vehicle purchases through the ensuing communications, and is planned to be used as the launch pad for the next digital marketing brand-awareness campaign.