Strategy & Design

The Challenge

This campaign was created with intent to enter the 2014 collegiate Effie Awards MINI brand challenge. The challenge was to create a multi-channel campaign focusing on social and experiential executions, targeting millennials, with the overall goal of putting MINI on the shopping list for millennial car buyers.

The Research

Outside of researching sociological trends concerning millennials, we also orchestrated MINI Dealer visits, 3 focus groups, 558 survey respondents, and read online MINI Forums (Reddit, the MINI Forum). Some of the key insights we gleaned from this research are that millennials are at an age where they crave independence and individual expression, view their aspirations as too distant to consider, in many ways they feel society has delayed their milestones, aspire to be urbanites, with active and adventurous lives, actively work to prove their unique value, are ambitious but sometimes because of this act above their age level and appear too mature. From all of this research, we distilled one key insight.

Millennials delay their major wants in life to first satisfy their functional needs and demonstrate responsibility.

This insight led to the big idea that this campaign would live under, which would challenge millennials to seize their youth:

Phase One

College Campus Experiential Promotion

A slot car track will be set up on select college campuses, and in order to participate students will have to fill out a quick survey that representatives will administer via iPads. The information gathered from the survey will be used to select at least one participant for phase two as well as build a contact list.

Phase Two

Mini Missions

The participant(s) selected from the survey data will be the first to go on a MINI mission. They will be given a MINI for a day, which will have a destination programmed into the GPS and hidden cameras, (which will highlight the MINI + GoPro connectivity capabilities) . The participants will not know where they are going, but will eventually end up at a location that caters to skydiving or bungee jumping. They will be filmed participating in one of these activities and the video will be uploaded to MINI USA's Youtube channel. The video and channel have the end goal of pushing viewers to download the MINI Missions app. The MINI Missions app allows MINI drivers to share locations of attractions or activities with other app users (with moderator approval). The location of the Mission can then be sent directly to the car via MINI Connect.

Phase Three

Live Young

The last phase of this campaign is to continue Live Young in a variety of media: Online video ads, billboards, print ads, online rich media, and direct mail to recent graduates as a part of the MINI Graduate program, a required deliverable for this campaign.

Print/Digital Ads

Video Ad Storyboards

MINI College Grad Program