Audi’s Gold Medal Efforts Shine At Olympics 06/10

Branded Documentary Breaks Through the Clutter

Challenge
Within the US luxury car market, Audi’s marketing strategy has been to outsmart, rather than outspend, the competition. Among high profile media events, the Winter Olympics is the perfect fit for the Audi brand DNA. However, Audi needed help standing out in an event where the other luxury auto brands spend so much more.

MediaCom’s Strategy
We leveraged Audi’s longtime association with the US ski team, and from concept to distribution, we worked with Audi to create “Truth in Motion: The U.S. Ski Team’s Road to Vancouver,” a cinematic documentary from a world-class creative team. We secured distribution for the documentary on primetime NBC, and DVR-proof interstitials transitioned seamlessly from film to commercial break, giving Audi unmistakable ownership.

The film premiered two weeks prior to the start of the games, kicking off NBC’s Olympic programming and leveraging the US ski team’s success to drive interest. Online and on-air promotion—including online teaser clips distributed through blog outreach, social media channels and major video portals such as YouTube—drove tune-in. Cross channel airings and digital distribution on iTunes, Hulu, NBC.com and NBCOlympics.com helped to amass audience and drive engagement.

Results
Our primetime premiere outperformed the prior week’s programming in the same time period. Digital performance was equally impressive, with full feature film downloads and almost 1 million views of video clips teasing the premiere on YouTube. Following the premiere and coinciding with our digital distribution of the film, search traffic for Audi was up astronomically during February.