BMW M2 Launch • A Nostalgic Thrill Ride Captured on Film

Client
BMW
Solutions
Video (TV/CTV)Social CampaignsOriginal ContentBrand MediaContent DistributionStudio

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Case Study

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Branded storytelling that taps into childhood dreams.

In an innovative tribute to gaming culture, BMW embarked on a captivating campaign for the launch of the M2. Recognizing the influence of arcades and racing simulators on a generation of automotive enthusiasts, the goal was to create a compelling narrative that resonates deeply with those racing fans who nurtured their passion for driving through video games. Through a thrilling film and social reels, we aimed to seamlessly bridge the nostalgia of childhood dreams with the exhilarating reality of experiencing the M2—depicting the car as the ultimate ride that consumers have waited their lives for.

Capturing digital thrills and real-world performance in video content creation.

Bringing the vision to life, the BMW M2 campaign film was directed by Lukas Tielke, who captured the car's essence in breathtaking detail. Renowned photographer André Josselin meanwhile shot striking visuals that were integral in creating a strong visual narrative throughout the campaign. These were complemented by engaging social media reels crafted by Kris Declan Spurr, specifically tailored to captivate a younger audience.

An immersive, thrilling creative concept inspired by games.

While the M2 was the star of the show, the campaign’s artistic message was reinforced by audio-visual elements, meticulously designed to evoke the electrifying atmosphere of gaming. A heads-up display reminiscent of a racing simulator was integrated into the film, offering viewers a familiar vantage point. The soundtrack and sound effects likewise drew inspiration from nostalgic arcade environments, taking viewers on an auditory journey that paralleled the car’s swift navigations of challenges like weaving through tight obstacles and navigating sharp turns.

Our Craft

Showcasing BMW M2’s ultimate ride experience.

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An artful, streamlined approach to digital marketing campaign-building.

Since 2020, our collaboration with BMW through the Marcom Engine has streamlined marketing efforts, ensuring a cohesive and impactful digital marketing campaign for the M2. As part of this innovative setup, we closely collaborated with BMW to manage the entire production process for the M2 campaign, from creative concept development through to the final stages of post-production.

The BMW M2 launch is a testament to the seamless integration of creativity and technology for branded storytelling. By blending nostalgic gaming elements with cutting-edge automotive storytelling, we transformed fantasy into adrenaline-fueled reality, bringing the BMW M2 to life in a way that resonates with auto enthusiasts everywhere.

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Boosting Your ROI by Strengthening the Upper Funnel

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Boosting Your ROI by Strengthening the Upper Funnel

CRM CRM, Consumer Insights & Activation, Data, Data maturity, Measurement 3 min read

As an Enterprise Consultant, there’s a question I often get from clients when we start working together on their digital marketing campaigns: how can we improve the return on investment? Let’s take, for example, an email marketing campaign. There’s an abundance of factors that go into achieving the highest possible ROI—from personalizing your message to optimizing email campaign journeys based on the campaign performance—but while everyone’s focusing on click-through and open rates, the key is often hiding at an earlier stage.

For one of our clients, their team had spent quite a good amount of time and effort building a series of email marketing campaigns in order to optimize online customer journeys. Some results were great: the CTR, for example, was extremely high considering the industry benchmark. So, how come the team was not able to demonstrate the impact of their investment just yet?

As soon as our team set out to analyze the email campaign data from top to bottom, a common issue sprung into view. It wasn’t really about the email content or the automation settings. The problem was at the top of their email campaign journey: the number of email leads put into the campaign pipelines was significantly low.

Before you start, consider your input.

Data from the 2022 ROI Report by Nielsen shows that increased investment in upper-funnel to mid-funnel marketing campaigns elevated brands’ ROI by 70%. Clearly, it is critical to create and strengthen a marketing system where you can maximize the impact of your input and draw the best outcomes. However, at times, we forget two of the main aspects of implementing a successful marketing strategy: the amount and quality of your input. Both should be satisfied, because without a decent amount of quality email leads at the top of the email marketing funnel, the outcomes will never suffice or provide the expected value for the team’s investment.

The Nielsen report also shows a significant, positive correlation between audience targeting and campaign ROI: high target reach campaigns (those that aim to reach a large number of people within a specific target audience) present a higher ROI than medium and lower target reach campaigns. Considering the power of the upper-mid funnel marketing, audience targeting in the upper funnel can lead to unlock maximized potentials of campaign performance. But in order to secure a healthy amount of customers at the top of the funnel, approaching the right targets in your upper funnel campaigns is pivotal. And here’s the good news: media campaign platforms offer a variety of options for you to fine-tune your targeting strategies by grouping customers into meaningful subsets.

When it comes to navigating the myriad categories and data points used for targeting, I follow a list of strategies and criteria to better target and activate audiences in marketing campaigns, which in turn helps to improve the upper funnel. Note that some strategies may not be viable, depending on the features of the media campaign platforms your team is using or the availability of the online customer data.

Demographics: gender, age, education, job title, etc.
Life events: critical lifetime milestones such as change in marital status, having a baby, or buying a house.
Affinity: specific interests of consumers while browsing online.
In-market: strong consumer interest in the products or services you are selling.
Previous interactions with your website or app: visited, viewed a product, clicked “add to cart,” logged in, downloaded brochures, etc.
Current customers: existing records in CRM matching with the campaign channels.
Likely-to-be customers: people who are sharing similar characteristics to the existing customers.

By segmenting target customers into the right subsets and serving them relevant content in marketing channels, your team will be more likely to have strong upper pipelines, leading to stronger performance down the funnel. And if your team has robust input and a solid marketing system, ROI improvement is just around the corner!

There’s an abundance of factors that go into achieving the highest possible ROI, but while everyone’s focusing on click-through and open rates, the key is often hiding. Learn more. digital marketing campaign personalized marketing content marketing strategy media strategy Data Consumer Insights & Activation CRM Measurement Data maturity

My Marketing Channel Doesn't Work: A Digital Ad Fallacy

Read more about My Marketing Channel Doesn't Work: A Digital Ad Fallacy

My Marketing Channel Doesn't Work: A Digital Ad Fallacy

3 min read

Digital marketers are testing more new tactics, channels and strategies than at any time in recent memory. During the early 2000s, digital marketing mostly meant search and display efforts without much variety beyond those two ad formats. Today’s advertiser has a slew of new arrows in their quiver. While the interest in trying new channels and tactics has expanded, the evaluation criteria hasn’t. Way too often I hear, “we tried _____, but it wasn’t working, so we shut it off.” The common thread in almost all of these cases is that the marketers are not evaluating a channel or tactic based on what it was designed to do.

How Do I Know It’s Working?

I recently talked to an advertiser for an enterprise software product who was leveraging target account marketing on LinkedIn to reach executive-level decision makers. He told me it “wasn’t working.” When I asked him, “what do you mean when you say it isn’t working?” he responded that it wasn’t generating any leads. I looked at his campaigns, and saw that he was showing ads to VPs and CXOs, driving them to a free demo signup page.

Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes for a moment: A senior executive isn’t interrupting their day to click on an ad from a company they’ve never interacted with, and then immediately signing up for a demo with a salesperson without interacting with any other content on the site. Heck, even a junior employee doing research for a senior executive probably wouldn’t request a sales demo without doing significantly more research than reading one ad and one landing page. Saying that these LinkedIn campaigns “don’t work” is like throwing a cheetah in a swimming pool with a dolphin and calling it slow when it loses a swim race.

Think Like a Customer

Last year we invested in a single sign on software (SSO) to enhance our company’s digital security. Our CEO was the ultimate decision-maker on the purchase and gave signoff on the investment, but there was no chance that he would take 30 minutes listening to a demo pitch. He assigned our Director of Technology to lead the evaluation process. That director did demo four different software platforms before ultimately making a recommendation that our CEO approved.

Ok fine, but then why worry about showing our CEO an ad at all? When our CEO tasked that director with leading the evaluation process, he mentioned that he knew Company A and Company B had offerings that were worth evaluating. So before any serious research took place, two of the four spots for consideration were decided. Influencing our CEO’s likelihood of mentioning, remembering, or just being aware of Company A and Company B is exactly why you show him an ad even if he’s never going to convert on a demo offer.

Evaluate the Right Way

So how should you evaluate success? That depends on what marketing tactic you’re using and what it is meant to accomplish. Or, continuing the metaphor from before, whether it was designed to sprint in the plains or swim in the ocean, so to speak.

If you imagine yourself as the SSO software marketer trying to influence our CEO, you should first divvy up targeting between prospecting and remarketing for evaluators and influencers. Each of the four segments would have a different measure for success.

If you’re getting in front of CXOs and driving heavy site engagement and lots of return visits, you’ve won. How much would you pay for the CEO of one of your top 500 target accounts to come to your site, spend five minutes clicking around, seeing that you are a leader on a recent Gartner report (or any other prominent award), and then download an ungated asset? For many B2B companies, that’s probably worth $500+. So who cares if you’ve spent $5,000 with two conversions if you’re driving killer engagement left and right?

The purchase funnel continues to get more complex. You’re rarely going to hit a home run on the first pitch, so start to weigh the walks and singles that ultimately lead to scoring runs. If you’re evaluating the right metrics and not giving up on channels and tactics for the wrong reasons, you’re going to end up with more deals and revenue, and those are the ultimate success metrics.

Learn more on how our performance.monks can help with these tough challenges as they arise.

3 Ways Brands Made Themselves More Relatable in 2018

Read more about 3 Ways Brands Made Themselves More Relatable in 2018

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4 min read

Kids today—amidst intense competition from disruptive challenger brands and direct-to-consumer rivals, businesses may find themselves struggling to compete. In an age of social marketing and the power of word-of-mouth, being liked boils down to being relatable.

Think about it: today, social media has prompted many more of us (not just millennials) to befriend our favorite brands. In fact, it’s one of the few environments where users really want to consume branded and sponsored content. With marketing embedded in environments where customers communicate with friends and family, they naturally gravitate toward those they relate to most.

Now, being relatable doesn’t mean trying to jump on the bandwagon of whatever the popular slang or meme of the moment is. Rather, brands that want to appear more relatable must gain a close understanding of their audience: their interests, their concerns and their sense of humor. If charismatic competition luring your customers away feels #SoRelatable, consider how you deal with these three areas in your marketing.

The Right Place for the Right Audience

A key factor in relatability is knowing your audience and catering to their communities. This is especially necessary for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG’s), a space in which it can be difficult to differentiate from competition beyond price. But one brand with a keen awareness of what makes its audience tick is Old Spice. Once associated with an older audience, the brand has bounced back in the past decade to become one of the top hygiene brands for young men.

Foamzone Twitch recording.00_24_55_00.Still002

Old Spice has hosted several of its recent campaigns through interactive livestreams. Take its Foam Zone event from early fall for example, which placed influencers into a series of football-themed challenges featuring the brand’s foam body wash. Inspired by Japanese game shows like Ninja Warrior, the event offered audience participation by activating challenges through polls, hashtags and emoji-sharing on each broadcast platform. Old Spice is no stranger to niche platforms like Twitch, and this event demonstrated the brand’s ability to embed itself among communities favored by its target audience. Having a clear presence within a community and closely interacting with fans isn’t something that only direct-to-consumer brands should do; for Old Spice, it’s no sweat.

Earning Consumers’ Trust

Relatability is also key to defining tough-to-understand value propositions or garnering trust in the consumer. In terms of defining your value proposition, collaborating with influencers or personalities your audience identifies with provides a sense of familiarity as they learn more about you and your products. For example, teaching consumers how to use the latest technology isn’t always an easy sell; customers who lack confidence in their technical understanding can shut down when given the opportunity to try something new. Using relatability to build trust is also beneficial if you anticipate skepticism or concerns from your audience—for example, how personal data is handled.

Knowing that users might be intimidated by smart appliances, Samsung staged a walkthrough of its ecosystem at the 2018 Berlin FWA innovation show. This wasn’t your ordinary “day in the life” presentation: users were able to step into the Griffin family home—of Family Guy fame—through a mixed-reality experience. There, they were tasked with helping Peter Griffin accomplish an afternoon’s worth of chores using the smart Samsung appliances. Because Peter isn’t the smartest tool in the shed, even tech novices can feel smart while activating the different devices for him and seeing how they interact with one another.

Another example for earning trust is the #GetTheYes campaign for the Amazon Teen program. “The campaign targeted kids on visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat during back-to-school season,” said Chris Byrne, Director of US Parternships and Production at MediaMonks, “providing tools they could use to create custom artwork to share to their parents persuading them for their own Amazon account.” The campaign spoke directly to the way kids socialize and creatively generate content online—acing our right place, right audience tip above—while paying special care to the feelings of parents who worry about their kids growing up too fast.

Monk Thoughts By turning a campaign into a creative and educational experience—the art of persuasion is a valuable life skill, after all—Amazon made an offer that was hard to say ‘no’ to.

Chris Byrne

Global Program Director, MediaMonks

Accurately Representing Your Audience

FileMaker, a workplace innovation platform that allows businesses to increase productivity through custom-build applications, faced a similar challenge in making a value proposition to users. Our solution was to poke fun at innovation’s status as a buzzword. As a level-headed businesswoman makes the case for how FileMaker solves common business challenges, a top-knotted, paradigm-shifting employee interrupts her in each scene to present an obviously bad idea.

This brings us to another important consideration in relatability: representation. While it’s not the focus of the series, each video starts with the trope of a man interrupting or mansplaining to the businesswoman. Viewers of any gender might enjoy poking fun at the ridiculous ideas, though women who have dealt with similar personalities in the workplace will especially relate. Representation matters in any campaign, and is essential to how consumers relate to brands. Businesses that see a need in making themselves more relatable might start by looking at their past campaigns and how they do (or don’t) represent the audience they want.

Ideally, customers should be able to see themselves in the scenarios you place before them. In addition to representation, context is key; if you don’t have a sophisticated understanding of how your audience interacts with their favorite platforms, you might consider collaborating with a partner who does. This helps you better tailor your voice and capabilities to specific audiences and platforms. With a message that resonates with audiences and a more relatable brand, organizations can maintain their competitive edge amidst the recent wave of direct-to-consumer marketing and established, charismatic brand voices on social media.

Facing increased competition from direct-to-consumer business and #winning brands on social media, businesses must try harder to produce relatable digital marketing campaigns. 3 Ways Brands Made Themselves More Relatable in 2018 Ditch the avocado toast memes—relating to today’s consumers requires a more sophisticated and strategic approach, including better representation and creative collaborations.
relatable marketing digital marketing campaign social media marketing millennial marketing strategy millennial marketing campaign

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