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In February 2010 Honda set out to make the world’s first crowd-sourced film. The cast, music and ideas were sourced from the online community centered on www.liveeverylitre.com. The project was targeted at five markets (UK, Spain, France, Germany and Italy) and was exclusively promoted online with minimal paid-for media. Results to date – over 100,000 unique visitors to the website, 4000 people receive weekly newsletters 1057 fans and 122,000,000 impressions on facebook.
Brief
Grey London, along with word-of-mouth marketing specialists, Wildfire, were tasked with creating a groundbreaking social media campaign which would engage a new, younger audience for Honda Motor Europe around the launch of its new sporty hybrid car, the CR-Z.
Strategy
To reach the target audience of young, social-media savvy Europeans, the agency team came up with the creative platform, Live Every Litre. The end goal of the project was to use social media to create the world’s first crowd-sourced documentary film – including the content, cast and music – whilst offering real people the opportunity to fulfil the personal journeys they’ve always wanted to make.
Execution
The agency team, lead by Grey, started by building an interactive community site – www.liveeverylitre.com – which provided the focal point for the project. The site, which was launched on 04th February 2010, ultimately asked people one simple question – ‘If we gave you the keys to our new sporty hybrid car, the Honda CR-Z, what journey would you make?’
They then set about engaging a European-wide community using targeted Facebook advertising, email, a Facebook Fan Page, Twitter and word-of mouth in order to ask people to submit their stories, which they could support with video and images.
Activity was supported by the recruitment of bloggers from across Europe – managed by social media agency, 90:10 Group – to a number of specific roles covering each of the key stages of the campaign. Across Honda Europe’s five key markets, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, 25 bloggers were recruited in total – commenting on the Live Every Litre blog, in the weekly newsletter, as well as in their own communities.
Community members were encouraged to rate their favourite journeys, before a ‘casting blogger’ in each key market selected a shortlist based on the most highly rated entries. The shortlisted journeys were then put in front of a casting panel consisting of representatives from the production team, Honda Motor Europe and Grey. Of the 1,000 journeys submitted, 13 were chosen for inclusion in the film.
The selected journeys range from a war veteran retuning to the beaches of the D-Day landings for the first time to three lads from London who wanted to try and sail a bouncy castle across Lake Garda.
Each of the cast member journeys were then uploaded onto an interactive site, designed and built by digital marketing agency, VML. Each individual cast member has a profile page where community members can read their stories and see the route their journey will take on the map. The site also enables people to interact with our cast and crew by making suggestions about diversions they could take, people they could meet and places they should see along the way.
In addition to this all of the cast and crew were kitted out with Nokia N97 minis, which enable them to upload photos and video to the Live Every Litre site via TwitPic and TwitVid whilst on the move. They are also able to publish their exact location details to the Live Every Litre Facebook fan page thanks to Nokia’s new service, Lifecasting with Ovi.
Grey commissioned award-winning documentary maker, Claudio Von Planta and his production team (The Long Way Round and The Long Way Down with Ewan McGregor) to shoot the film, which is taking place across Europe over a 35 day period during May and June 2010. Daily edits have been posted to the Live Every Litre site throughout filming accompanied by crowd-sourced music from unsigned musicians from across the Globe.
Results
The campaign has generated over a 100,000 unique users to the Live Every Litre site to date and more than 10,000 registered community members from across Europe, who submitted almost 1,000 entries.
Organic press coverage around the campaign has been high throughout Europe, with standout coverage on the BBC and in the Metro, The Sun and The Mirror in the UK alone. The daily edits which have been posted to the Live Every Litre YouTube channel have also received massive attention globally, with the bouncy castle clip in particular generating more than 250,000 views in its first few days online.
The end result will be a full-length documentary film following the incredible journeys made by our crowd-sourced cast. The film is due to be premiered across Europe towards the end of July 2010, both on and offline.
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