Or, Welcome to The Hamilton Engineering School…
Occasionally you get to work on something that ticks all of the boxes:
- Real entertainment value
- Triple A access and talent
- An aligned purpose
- A world class production company
No, that last one’s not a grandiose overclaim for our own abilities – for this first hero campaign in a few years Whisper TV were drafted in to do the content production. Whisper is a specialist sports agency which manages the live F1 broadcasts on Channel 4, amongst many other things.
Their concept was a classic surprise and delight campaign, with a celebrity (in this case Lewis Hamilton) disguised as someone innocous (a grizzled old engineer called Des) who then surprises some innocent bystanders (3 x primary school children) in an unusual scenario (on a tour of the Mercedes-AMG F1 factory).
So yes, this approach is a tried and tested one, but with the quality of both the organising and production parties involved there was a lot of value to be created.
Our role on this one was to help shape the social assets and then plan out the promotional campaign, including asset and copy testing up-front and then optimisation across markets and audiences across three phases of activity.
We also roped in our old chums at Viral Seeding to get the campaign maximum exposure across news, sports, education and lifestyle outlets – which they duly did, securing placements on the BBC homepage and six national newspapers, along with 99 other publications.
The cherry on the cake was that Lewis enjoyed the experience so much he shared the film on his own social profiles – something we were told he had not done for several years for a brand activation.