77% of magazines along with their ads end up in the trash. This is a huge waste of paper. So when Volkswagen wanted to create a campaign to promote the eco-conscious thinking behind its BlueMotion vehicles, their ad agency Ogilvy developed a print insert that got the people of Cape Town to recycle the magazines via the cities post boxes!
Volkswagen has turned the E6, often described as the Norwegian equivalent to Route 66, into a real-time online game of roulette using Google Maps and Street View.
TRY/Apt from Oslo devised the game to highlight the main feature of the new Golf BlueMotion, its low fuel consumption, in a meaningful and memorable way.
By “roulette”, Volkswagen literally meant dividing the E6 into thousands of map “slots” and asking people to bet on the exact spot where a fully tanked Golf BlueMotion would finally run out of fuel. Each person could place only one guess. If the car stopped on your chosen spot, you would win it.
In automotive efficiency marketing, a technical number only becomes persuasive when people can translate it into distance, time, and a story they want to test.
The one-guess rule is the underrated design choice. If you only get one bet, you do not throw it away casually. You start researching. How efficient is the car, really. How far could it realistically go. What kind of driving conditions matter. The game turns “I saw an MPG claim” into “I tried to estimate a real outcome.”
That is the brand win. You are not pushing information at people. You are pulling them into the proof.
Published campaign results describe close to 50,000 people placing bets, with roughly the same number visiting the site on the day of the drive. The car reportedly kept going for 27 hours and came to a halt about 1,570 km north of Oslo, turning a fuel-consumption spec into a distance people can picture.
Even better. There was a real winner. The reporting names Knud Hillers as the person who picked the precise spot where the car finally stopped.
BlueMotion Roulette is an interactive Volkswagen campaign that turns a real highway into a map-based betting game. People guess where a Golf BlueMotion will run out of fuel on one tank. If they guess correctly, they win the car.
Because it makes the “distance” claim tangible. The map gives precision, context, and credibility, and it lets people choose an exact location rather than a vague number.
It increases commitment. If you only get one bet, you are more likely to look up facts and make a reasoned estimate, which forces deeper engagement with the product story.
If the outcome is unclear or disputed, the proof collapses. The run, the rules, and the documentation of the final stopping point all need to be transparent and easy to understand.
Participation volume, repeat visitation on “event day”, social conversation during the live window, and whether people can correctly retell the mechanic and the proof outcome afterward.
I am sure some of you may have already heard of the “The Fun Theory” campaign by Volkswagen that just recently won the Cannes 2010 Cyber Grand Prix for a digitally led integrated campaign.
For those who have not heard of the campaign, The Fun Theory was all about generating interest in Volkswagen’s Blue Motion technologies that deliver the same great car performance with reduced environmental impact, and to do this, they found an insight around how “fun” could change human behavior for the better, and this formed The Fun Theory, a campaign that spawned over 700 user generated Fun Theory initiatives along with a number of big viral hits that generated over 20 million YouTube views, with one rushing past 12 million views alone!
This is one of those campaigns where the “digital” part is not a layer added at the end. It is the distribution engine. It is how the idea travels, how participation scales, and how a single insight turns into hundreds of initiatives people want to copy, remix, and share.
The Fun Theory is built on a simple behavioral observation. If you make the better choice fun, more people will do it. That is the core. Everything else is execution.
It is a digitally led integrated campaign built on the idea that making the better choice fun can change human behavior for the better, while building interest in Volkswagen’s Blue Motion technologies.
Because it scaled into participation. It spawned hundreds of user generated initiatives, not just one-off attention.
The campaign positioned Blue Motion as delivering the same great car performance with reduced environmental impact, then used “fun” as the behavioral hook to earn attention and sharing.
If you can pair a simple behavioral mechanism with a credible product story, digital channels can turn one idea into a repeatable format that communities propagate for you.
If people can describe it quickly, repeat it without you, and share it with minimal friction, it is built to scale.
