Shortlisted 2018
AUTOMOTIVE
Brand
MICHELIN
Lead Agency
WAVEMAKER
Contributing Company
LICHTHOF GMBH
MICHELIN DRIVESTYLE SEASON 02
The Challenge
Tires! Yeah … who cares. Almost nobody.
Tires are low involvement products with long purchase cycles. The WAVEMAKER mission: increase Michelin’s brand preference. And make Michelin visible in the passive purchase phase, when nobody’s interested in product information. Michelin has taken the backseat in terms of branded content for too long, not making use of it’s assets.
The goal was to create a globally relevant content series. Total reach and qualitative factors (view rate, 100% view rate and dwell time) were set as main KPIs.
Welcome to DRIVESTYLE, Season 02.
The Strategy
Why DRIVESTYLE? Well, to give back the desire to buy Michelin, by setting the brand back in the buyers’ relevant set.
Fair enough – but how does Michelin influence its target group during the nearly infinite passive stage (one to three years on average) of their purchase journey?
Branded content it is. But you knew that already, didn’t you? The target group loves entertainment. Of course, they do. Knowing the most relevant topic areas for the target audience like cars, tech and lifestyle, WAVEMAKER Germany
created a genuine mini series: DRIVESTYLE. An entertainment format that is all about car passion and human to human experiences. The brand is a natural part of the show and provides the framework of each episode. Michelin is presenter, mover and shaker of DRIVESTYLE.
The Implementation
DRIVESTYLE is live on YouTube. Pushed via media, social, hosts and featured guests. Guests like Larry Chen from Speedhunters, an international collective of photographers, writers and drivers. Each episode shows dream cars, dream drives and longed-for destinations: Weissach, Le Mans, the Nürburgring, the Autobahn and a winding alpine road. The cars? Porsche GT3 RS, Mercedes-AMG GT R, Mercedes-AMG E63S, Ford GT.
Put another way: The top of the automotive food chain. Topics and guests were chosen carefully to appeal to an international audience. The series was not only used by Michelin in 15 different countries across the globe, but also distributed by automotive partners Porsche, Mercedes AMG and Ford – outperforming some of their own content projects.
Michelin clearly prioritizes the user experience with high quality content. WAVEMAKER’s production partner of choice since day one: Lichthof, Cologne.
The Result
WAVEMAKER created a genuine content approach to set the brand in the users’ everyday lives, distributed in 15 countries across the globe.
A true story of success – with two seasons, eight episodes, more than 5 million views on the German YouTube channel alone and an uplift in brand consideration of 76%. Total international reach was over 22,5M views across the different countries.
Paid media results also were impressive: Used as YouTube prerolls, the episodes had an average view rate (the skippable ad is watched for 30 seconds or longer) of 49,6% – far exceeding the industry benchmark of 20%. Overall,
13% of users that saw DRIVESTYLE as an ad watched the episodes until the very end (episodes were between 9 minutes and 10 minutes long), even though they could have skipped after 5 seconds. This is an outstanding result considering the extensive length of the content.
Articles on automotive platforms with massive reach such as Speedhunters and Car Throttle contributed to the organic reach of DRIVESTYLE.
In 2018, WAVEMAKER and Michelin will be working on season 3 of DRIVESTYLE – continuing this very successful partnership.