Lexus: SLIDE, Amazing in Motion, 2 [video]

Credits & Description:

Additional info: CHI&Partners - "SLIDE, Amazing in Motion"
Agency (& City): CHI & Partners, London
Executive Creative Director : Jonathan Burley
Creative Director: Monty Verdi
Copywriter(s): Brad Woolf & Dan Bailey
Art Director(s): Brad Woolf & Dan Bailey
Digital & Content Creatives: Chad Warner & Ben Da Costa
Digital Designer : Chad Warner
Agency Executive Producer: Zoe Barlow
Agency Producers: Nikki Cramphorn, Nicola Ridley, Matt Cresswell
Content Producer : Karina Aloupi
CEO : Nick Howarth
Business Director : Jack Shute
Account Director: Catherine Peacock
Account Managers : Chris Tivey & Lexi Alston
Planner : Rebecca Munds
Public Relations Manager: Nita Rushi
Art Buyer : Emma Modler
Production Company (& City): Smuggler, London
Film Director(s): Henry-Alex Rubin
Directors Assistant : Sarah Michler
Executive Producer(s): Fergus Brown & Chris Barrett
Producer : Ray Leakey
Cinematographer/DOP: Ken Seng
Production Designer : Joel Collins
Model Maker: Robert Jones & Glenn Haddock
Production Company (& City) : Goodgate, Spain
Producer : Gordon Mackinnon
Hooverboarder(s) : Ross McGouran & Ignacio Morata
Post Production (& City) : Marshall Street Editors, London
Editor : Spencer Ferszt
Editor Assistant : Jake Armstrong
Post Production Company : MPC, London
VFX Supervisor : Bill McNamara
Post Production Supervisor : Tim Phillips
Colourist : Jean-Clement Soret
Audio Post Production : Wave Studios, London
Sound Design : Parv Thind
Content Production Company (& City) : Carbon, London
Head of Carbon : Chris Reed
Content Director(s) : Ben Hanson & Simon Frost
Content Producer : Nazneen Hosenie
Content DOP : Ben Hanson, Simon Frost & James Blann
Additional Content DOP : Chris Thomas
Content Editor : Simon Pearson, Pete Brenan & Alastair Graham
Content Colourist : Simon Pearson
Content Post Production Producer : Leanne Tarvin
Content Graphic Animator & Supervisor: Thomas Brady
Content Post Production: Kerry Arif & Aubrey Ghansah
Content Audio / Sound Design : Russell Bradley @ Scramble
Photography : Olly Burn
Photography's Assistant : Hannah Rose
Music Company (& City) : Platinum Rye, London
Music Artist and Title : Rudimental "Waiting all Night"
Music Composition : "Waiting all Night"
Master Recording : Warner Music
Publishing: Bucks Music, BMG Rights Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing
Music Supervisors : Platinum Rye
Music Writer : Edward Jonathan Harris, Kesi Dryden, Piers Sean Aggett, Amir Izadkhah & James Richard Newman
Digital Content Strategy : AllTogetherNow, London
CEO : Conor McNicholas
MD : Steve Parker
Account Director : James Chanter
Technical Partners (& City) : evico GmbH, Germany
CEO : Dr Oliver De Haas
Chief Engineer: Dr Lars Kuhn
Engineer : Marcel Hupfel & Kai Gunther
Technical Partners (& City) : IFW Dresden, Germany
Pioneer of Superconducting Levitation: Dr Ludwig Schultz
Chief Engineer Supratrans : Dietmar Berger
Scientist : Thilo Espenhahn
Engineer : Ronald Uhlemann
Lexus International Clients: Atsushi Takada, David Nordstorm & Yolande Waldock
Product: Lexus
Advertiser: CHI & Partners / Lexus International
The Campaign
The Lexus brand has been long admired for its luxury credentials, quality and service. However, it is not known for being imaginative, exciting or cool. So the challenge was to connect with a new, younger audience and get them excited about the brand. However, the progressive luxury audience that it wanted to engage was not listening to Lexus, which was outnumbered and outspent by the German luxury automotive brands. To connect with its audience Lexus needed to do something to out-smart its competitors.
The answer was inspired by the words of Lexus Chief Engineer Haruhiko Tanahashi – “There is no such thing as impossible, it’s just a matter of figuring out how”. We created a real, rideable Hoverboard and shared the progress we made through a variety of social and media channels over a two month period.
From the very beginning, the project was designed to be digitally contagious – so it would spread like wildfire across social media and influence the influencers, meaning global coverage would become the fuel for the campaign.
Meticulous attention to detail was spent planning the two-month narrative for the project. A number of different videos and PR milestones were developed to engage the world’s media and key influencers at the right time.
In under 24 hours, the campaign drove more than 100million+ impressions, generated over 11million+ views and #LexusHover was trending on Twitter and Facebook. Mainstream media from BBC, CNN, USA Today, ABC World News published editorial on the campaign, and CNBC live-broadcast an interview with a marketing expert on their channel, heralding the tease film a “marketing slam-dunk by Lexus”.
On 5th August when the full campaign broke, international coverage exploded online – Reuters, Huffington Post, BBC, Wired, Bloomberg, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, E!Online, TMZ, Fox News and many more, were all writing and tweeting about the campaign. Fast Company even released a filmed interview piece with two of their tech editors questioning if you are a Lexus competitor what do you do next?
In total, the Lexus Hoverboard campaign has generated over US$56milllion in equivalent media value, driven more than 33+million views worldwide and over 1.7billion impressions. 97.5% of the local markets worldwide have activated the campaign online via PR and owned social media channels. 40% of web traffic driven to the Lexus site was Hoverboard related activity. The Lexus Hoverboard is currently the brand’s most successful online campaign to-date.
As the volume of global ‘branded content’ continues to grow exponentially, increasingly it takes something special to stand out. Lexus needed to tell the story of the imagination, ingenuity and creativity that runs through their brand. They needed to tell that story in a way that would be digitally contagious, where the world¹s press, digital influencers, and the public at large became the communicators, rather than paid for media plan.
To answer this challenge, together with Lexus we conceived, developed and created one of the iconic products of recent popular culture, the Hoverboard. For real. Showcasing their design and engineering credentials, but crucially also showing their pure imagination, the project took the world by storm. The unique project inspired a range of international audiences from tech, design, film, motoring, lifestyle and beyond, generating tens of millions of pounds of coverage purely by the strength of the idea, not the size of the media budget.