While I was the Creative Director at Play (a division of Denuo which was then absorbed by Razorfish), Cadillac approached us to address their brand perception issues they had with males 18-34. To that demographic, Cadillac meant their grandparent's old boat that got gallons to the mile and looked more like a hearse than a cool car.
Solution: DOWNLOAD, RACE, WIN.
Make the Cadillac's V-Series cars (0-50 in under 5) free downloadable content for the XBox 360's premier racing game, Project Gotham Racing 3, to go head-to-head with the best cars on the planet. Then create a competition for gamers using the cars to get exclusive badges distinguishing themselves from other gamers.
· First marketer on the XBox 360
· First marketer to underwrite downloadable game content for the XBox 360
· The three Cadillac V-Series cars were downloaded over 306,000 times
· The V-Series were used in over 1 million races with a time spent of over 512 days
· 2006 Gold MIXX Award
· 2006 Gold OMMA Award
· 2006 Most Contagious List
This was the first time something like this had been done, so we needed to get the word out. To make sure that the gamers knew that they HAD TO get their mitts on this, we made media part of the deal and ran ads on Xbox Live, XBox.com, Xboxlive.com, Majornelson.com and MSN.com.
So what was the competition that I was referring to? Glad you asked. It was called CADILLAC ELITE.
Use any of the three V-Series Collection cars on the Nurburgring race track and get a top 100 time to become one of the prestigious few Cadillac Elite players. When a gamer attained this, they were presented with a pop-up alerting them to this achievement as well as an exclusive Cadillac gamerrpic—social currency for this competitive environment.
When it was clear that we had a hit on our hands Cadillac wanted to leverage this program as much as possible. One of those ways was to re-paint their two Cadillac CTS-V race cars (#16 shown above) hyping the program to racing fans.
*PGR 3, the game we partnered with, sold 1.35 MM units at retail. Half of those 1.35 MM units were purchased by users that did not have a connected Xbox and therefore could not download the Cadillac V-Series Collection. So, a little under half of those eligible to participate in the program did.
Nobody reads anymore, but when they actually do, it needs to be on point. All copy on this project? This guy.
DOWNLOAD. RACE. WIN.
EXPERIENCE VEHICULAR EUPHORIA
THE CARS ARE VIRTUAL, THE RUSH IS REAL
3 DIFFERENT SERVINGS OF AUTOMOTIVE ADRENALINE
'nuff said.
Lastly, running creative point and coordinating the project between GM, Microsoft, Bizarre Creations (UK), Leo Burnett Detroit, Modernista, Arc Worldwide, and the Cadillac Racing Team was... fun.
Fun? No. That isn't true. It was a challenge to be sure, but it is what needed to happen to get this project to see the light of day and more than worth it with the results that we achieved.