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Project Overview

After the success of the Audi Snapchat campaign during the Super Bowl for the Audi A3, Audi was eager to continue to build relationships with female, Millennial, first-time luxury buyers. Huge helped Audi forge a first-of-its-kind social TV partnership with ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, the most tweeted-about show on television. The partnership, a first for the network and the most deeply integrated second-screen collaboration in the automotive industry, enabled Audi to engage the target audience in a brand new way.

Project Commissioner

Audi

Project Creator

Huge Inc

Project Brief

The automotive brand’s goal was to integrate the brand into television pop culture, while authentically building on the second screen behavior of Millennials and delivering value and entertainment on their terms. Millennials have proved difficult for brands to reach due to their multi-tasking, shorter attention spans, and the fact that they typically ignore traditional advertising methods. In addition, brands are still largely unsure of how to reach users on Snapchat: snaps are, by their nature, ephemeral, and engagement metrics are not easy to access. The popular Audi snaps during the Super Bowl set an industry standard for audience engagement. The brand wanted to continue making headlines with its innovative, first-in-class digital campaigns.

Project Need

To identify the best partnership fit, the Huge team evaluated several popular TV shows on the following criteria: TV media presence; Twitter following; Twitter conversation; social presence, integration and potential impact; campaign customization options; and newsworthiness. We chose ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars to engage the Millennial target audience: it’s the number one show among women aged 18 to 34 and was named the most tweeted show on TV, even beating out the series finale of Breaking Bad. Best of all, the Pretty Little Liars audience is dedicated, highly engaged and social-savvy, and craves second-screen content that complements the viewing experience. Working closely with ABC Family, Audi could offer real value to the target demographic: not by featuring heavily branded images of cars, but by connecting with users through their mobile phones in a way that was authentic to them. On Snapchat, we could engage with the target audience by adding value, while standing out among branded content in the cluttered social media landscape.

User Experience

Huge and Audi decided to create a premium viewing experience for Pretty Little Liars fans by creating fresh programmatic content just for the second screen, luring the show’s audience to tune into the Audi Snapchat each week. Every Tuesday, fans eagerly awaited the exclusive clues, commentary, puzzles, and star access that Audi provided, with buzz building on social media throughout the day. In addition, the project engaged Pretty Little Liars star Ian Harding to appear live on the Audi Snapchat account and interact with the audience during key episodes.

Crucially, we deployed the campaign strategically so as not to alienate Audi followers who may not have been Pretty Little Liars fans. By spreading the word about the campaign exclusively through TV-targeted promoted tweets to fans of the show, we bypassed automotive enthusiasts to reach only our intended targets.

Project Marketing

In fact, Twitter told us it was one of the most successful campaigns they’ve ever seen, performing better than 98% of all previous campaigns on the platform. A Nielsen Brand Effect study found that users who engaged with the campaign’s sponsored tweets were twice as likely as the average Twitter user to say Audi provides entertaining social media content. In addition, users who engaged with the sponsored tweets were 13% more likely to have a favorable view of the Audi brand overall, compared to the average user.

By all accounts, Audi successfully reached its female Millennial target demographics, who make up the vast majority of the Pretty Little Liars audience. Over the course of the campaign, Audi gained more than 115,000 Snapchat followers, reaching a total of 125,000. Snaps consistently received views in the five figures, up to 75,000 per snap and amounting to over 9.8 million views for all snaps during the season. Snapchat followers took more than 187,000 screenshots many of which were reposted to Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

Overall, Audi reached 487 million Twitter impressions during the season and generated 29,000 mentions of the #PLLAudi hashtag. The campaign also caught the attention of the media, generating more than 75 stories and blog posts, reaching over 97 million impressions. Audi, already frequently lauded as one of the best brands on Snapchat, solidified its status as a social thought leader on a rapidly growing platform.