Taking the scenic route: inside LadBible's virtual road trip for Toyota Yaris

Objectives

The campaign needed to highlight the Yaris’s radical evolution (from a 17-year-olds first car, or Grandad’s run-around) to the brand-new model. It also needed to showcase the Yaris’s best-in-class self-charging battery (no charger, no problem), a striking exterior redesign, a custom-designed JBL sound system and a host of cutting-edge digital features through its in-car screen.

Strategy

Working with our internal Data, Intelligence and Planning team, we learnt that 66% of the LadBible audience said they would ‘definitely or maybe’ book a holiday when restrictions were lifted. 73% of 18–34-year-olds in the LadBible audience (a demographic that includes NG Yaris’s target audience) said destination would be the deciding factor for their post-lockdown holiday.

Using these insights, we wanted to revolutionize the way Gen Z and Millennials considered the Yaris, and prove that the possibilities with a Yaris were endless. To do this, our strategy was to create an adventurous road trip that took the NG Yaris to destinations no road trip has gone before at a time when road trips were punishable by law.

Our solution was to create a world first: a moving, indoor road trip, taking you anywhere you like without ever leaving the room. All we needed now was a road trip guest, willing to have their mind blown. The experience would incorporate everything our audience loved about a good road trip: friends, great locations, good chat and music (and the all-important pit stop for snacks).

Execution

We constructed the world’s first car-sized treadmill, perched the NG Yaris on top and surrounded it with 13-foot high walls of LCD screens. Then, we took celebrity guests on the world’s most elaborate virtual reality road trip.

Thanks to the NG Yaris’s self-charging battery, we could shoot the car indoors, in full operation, safely, for as long as we wanted – highlighting that the NG Yaris is quite literally the only car in the world that could actually accomplish the Fantasy Road Trip.

The Fantasy Road Trip starred YouTuber Max Fosh, who was already a firm favorite with our audience. We echoed the interview style that had won him millions of fans and invited a broad spectrum of celebrity names, directly inspired by a poll of LadBible’s audience. Guests included a range of household names, including Olympian Sam Quek, musician Olly Murs, YouTube star Chunkz, and comedian Munya Chawawa, to ensure we were reaching the broad target audience set by Toyota.

In order to keep the audience gripped, we asked each talent to pick their dream road trip - and road trip meal - and then delivered six unique road trips across LadBible’s Facebook, Instagram and website. From March to June, the campaign clocked an epic number of miles across the social feeds of young people in the UK. We released the hero video of the episode across LadBible’s Facebook and IGTV and then created a gamified ‘What Happens Next’ cut down for Instagram stories reflecting how our audience like to view and engage with their content. We also ensured we had a regular ‘appointment to view’ content release strategy, ensuring a new episode was released fortnightly.

Results

Each road trip played out across LadBible’s Facebook and IGTV channels to reach a convoy of 28.8million people while a gamified road trip series on Instagram Stories got the fingers tapping their way to a whopping campaign total of 884,000 engagements.

Fantasy Road Trip completely flipped the narrative on Toyota’s Yaris image crisis by rocketing consideration for the new Yaris across the board.

These results include upping consideration by +8 Percentage Points, purchase intent by +3 Percentage Points, upping the NG Yaris as a ‘desirable car’ by +8 Percentage Points, that ‘the target audience trusts’ by +14 Percentage Points. These uplifts were significant for a social campaign, with all being above third-party research partner, OnDevice’s, benchmarks.

Beating close competitors, this campaign made the NG Yaris the most-viewed car on Facebook in the UK from a competitor set of 58 automotive social campaigns (Tubular Labs, Jan-June 2021).

Ultimately, we created a format where the NG Yaris was quite literally never off-screen and showed the endless possibilities and features in a way that young people love to engage with.

During a national lockdown that saw the country locked indoors for the first time in their lives, we brought an unbridled escapism directly to their feeds, positioning the NG Yaris as the go-to car for making wanderlust a reality the moment that lockdown ended.

This campaign was a winner at The Drum Awards for Social Media. To find out more, including which competitions are currently open for entry, visit The Drum Awards website.