Ford

Focus Raba’a Rally

Our brief was to launch the new Ford Focus in the region and educate people about its impressive features.

One of our biggest challenge was to make a relevant impact on our target audience in an already cluttered automotive market. In a market where 70% comprised of under 25 yrs olds and spend more than 9 hours online, we hosted the first ever inter-GCC rally where on-ground action meets online interaction.

Team Recruitment Phase

We launched an online recruitment campaign through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, receiving hundreds of entries from around the GCC. From them we chose the 6 teams (18 contestants) who would represent their home countries in the first inter-GCC rally.

Host DJ Dany Neville and our 6 captains.

Nationals from any GCC country can simply apply through the custom Facebook app.

We were quite surprised when the Oman team got selected, the national telecom of Oman tweeted to their followers to join and support the Omani team.

Online Pit Crew Recruitment Phase

Once the teams were selected, we recruited 6 virtual pit crew teams from our existing Facebook fanbase to help out, for a chance to win a brand new Ford Focus of their own.

A total of 6 separate facebook pages were created, each representing the GCC countries. Anyone can join, post, comment and interact with their respective teams.

Team captains were busy campaigning through their own respective social pages.

Rally Phase

The rally started in Riyadh KSA, once all ground and online pit crew teams were ready.

Different challenges were designed to engage both ground and online teams every step of their way. All were designed so that one has to rely on each other in order to finish the race. Penalties and advantage points were lost and earned respectively. Advantage points proved to be a game changer for many of our ground teams because it could meant losing a maximum of 100points in some of the challenges or gaining a 5min head start for their next challenge. All they needed was to have a fan win an online challenge.

A total of 8 pit stop challenges and 8 online pit crew challenges were designed and activated across all 6 GCC countries.

From start until the finish line, we managed to pull off a branded content show that is 100% Facebook driven, produced LIVE where for 10 consecutive days, we shot, edited, graded and upload all content online. Both film and social media crew were with us 24/7 for entire 10 days shoot.

Challenge 1 - Track Time

The first challenge was a simple but hard one to finish. Each ground team member had to drive one lap around a race track. Once he reached back to the starting point, he has to swap driving seats with his other team member. Now unless one of their online fans answered the question posted online right, the same driver cannot continue. The faster their fans answered, the faster they finished their laps.

Challenge 4 - Car Calligraphy

While the ground team were painting Arabic calligraphy using their Ford Focus cars, their online counterparts were also asked to write the word 'Raba'a' using whatever creative medium they felt like using.

Check out the entire episodes through Ford Middle East YouTube channel. Click here to start watching.

We provided each car with their own smartphones throughout the 4,000km trip. Lots of fun along the way.

Ground teams were more than happy posting their whereabouts to their online fans since each car was equipped with a built-in SatNav.

Results

The Ford Middle East Facebook page gained 70% more new fans by the time the campaign ended. That's a total of 72,000+ new fans while a 180 Million+ impressions were made online through paid, owned and earned media channels. Media coverage gained 2.5 Million print circulation value totaling to an earned $3 Million PR value.

All work