Interesting Background Information on Volvo's Online Branding Campaign for the new S40

An article on Brand Republic reveals some details about Volvo's recent spoof campaign, which featured a reall village in sweden, where a "strange phenomena" supposedly made everyone buy the same car.

Looks like it followed a very elaborate and complex script (via Adrants & Heiko):

"The advertising was backed with a longer version of the documentary featuring interviews with residents of Dalaro talking about the spooky phenomenon. It was supposedly directed by a Venezuelan filmmaker called Carlos Soto.

This was backed by a viral campaign directing people towards Soto's personal website where he outlined his suspicions that he was part of a set-up by Volvo.

But Volvo has now revealed that it is Spike Jonze, the director of the films 'Being John Malkovich' and 'Adaptation' as well as the legendary Beastie Boys video 'Sabotage', who made the documentary."

Nice Idea - but how successful was it ?

"The Swedish car maker said that hits to the Volvo UK website have more than doubled since the launch of the campaign, and that 435,000 digital viewers of the ad have selected the red button option to view the documentary via interactive TV.

Carlos Soto's spoof website has been visited by 77,000 people across Europe and the Volvo Dalaro site has had 440,000 hits, including 96,000 from the UK."

Really an interesting case for how to combine classic advertising with online branding, viral marketing and a lot PR !!

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