The People's Reviewer, a campaign to promote the Volkswagen Tiguan created by Tribal DDB, has taken top honours in this month's Creative Showcase, held in association with Microsoft Advertising.
At the heart of the campaign was a competition to find a new kind of car critic - The People’s Reviewer. Over 1000 people applied for the role. Nine contestants were finally selected and each was given the Tiguan for a week to try out and review. The video reviews were posted on the People’s Reviewer site where the public voted for their favourite. To help the contestants win votes Tribal taught them how to tell their story and generate support using social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.
As a result of the campaign the People's Reviewer received 251,411 site visits, there were over 50,000 video views and social media provided a reach of 2.2 million.
According to Tribal's Matt Ross, "People's Reviewer marks a significant shift to transparency by a major automotive manufacturer."
Kieron Matthews, marketing director at the IAB, praised the campaign saying: "It's great to see VW handing the opportunity to ordinary people to review their new Tiguan using online. The campaign was brilliantly delivered and ever so much more believable than the car traversing a mountain range in Switzerland in a TV ad."
In runners up spot was Master Control, a campaign for Nike Football+ created by AKQA.
Having purchased the Nike CTR360 boot, players were given a code which unlocked an elite training programme from FC Barcelona’s coaches featuring Cesc Fabregas and Andrés Iniesta. The campaign also allowed young players worldwide to share their training progress via social networks.
In third place was Speechbreaker by Lean Mean Fighting Machine, a campaign which gave users the tools to create political speech remixes and video mash-ups and upload them to YouTube.
As part of the campaign a dedicated Speechbreaker channel was created on YouTube. After a week it was the 7th most viewed and had reached its video upload limit.
