Mazda MX-5 Icon - Building brand awareness online

Challenge

To promote the Mazda MX-5 Icon car, build brand awareness, positively increase perception across a set of key brand attributes, actively engage the users of topgear.com and finally, highlight the effectiveness of the campaign through research.

Stunning advertorials drove readers to the Mazda Icon micro site

Idea

BBC Worldwide’s approach was to create a dedicated Mazda Icon microsite on topgear.com, incorporating an MX-5 game and voting system. Traffic would be channelled to the microsite through online directional and fixed placement adverts.

Execution

User interaction was key to raising brand awareness with this campaign.

BBC Worldwide designed a microsite around the Icon brand name, positioned the MX-5 as an icon itself and used iconic photography and video footage to record its journey along the Stelvio Pass (an iconic stretch of road in the Italian Alps).

Mazda’s driving simulation game got users interacting with the Mazda MX-5 brandThe same route was then recreated in an online game, so that users could experience for themselves what it would feel like to drive an MX-5 around one of the ‘must’ drive roads in Europe.

To reinforce the link between the new Mazda MX-5, iconic motoring products and experiences, users were prompted to vote for what they thought was the most iconic thing associated with motor driving.

Key to the campaign was measuring how effective it had been in changing user perception and attitude towards the Mazda MX-5 brand. To this end, a pop-up survey on the site was used, eliciting almost 13,000 responses.

Results

The microsite proved to be a success in building the brand perception of Mazda’s key attributes. There was an average increase of 13% points across the board for every brand attribute measured.

This included: positive impression, No1 value for money car, stylish, sporty, top performing, car like to be seen in and fun to drive car.

• 1 in 3 who saw the promotion responded by visiting the Icons microsite
• The microsite attracted 932,473 UK unique users, generating 1,792,841 UK page impressions
• The game was played nearly 4 million times, over 420,000 times from the UK

“It was an integrated solution that engaged the consumer/target with a multi platform solution. The creativity shown by the BBC Top Gear matched by the perfect audience alignment enthusiasts with Mazda won the business and enabled us to make the decision that only one media partner would be required.”

Mel Sroczynski – Marketing Communications Manager
Join the AOP group on LinkedIn - open for all Members to join
Subscribe to AOP's e-newsletter.