We partnered with Kia Europe to aid their repositioning as a sustainable mobility solution.
The brief was to inspire audiences and change brand perception with a 360 campaign that reflected Kia’s shift to EV, their nature inspired positioning and a desire to be aligned to board sports.
We began by inviting our colleagues at Capture Intelligence to provide us with deep insight into the EV category, Kia perception, and to explore audience perceptions of ‘Greenwashing’ in the industry.
They found that while the EV market was a level playing field vs traditional market in regard to brand preference, audiences trust was still lacking. They also saw that audiences would quickly turn off at empty ‘purpose’ claims, but would engage with reliable, authentic and relatable communication that demonstrated progress and personal emotional benefit.
These insights were picked up by the team at SHARE, and informed the consumer decision journey mapping, messaging, and the creative concept.
We created ‘Move Responsibly Together’ – an activation built around a series of innovative collaborations that explored the possibilities of eco-friendly movement.
The campaign saw us partner up with four progressive start-up brands in board sport culture; Polyola (Surfboards), Odyssey Innovation (Handplanes), Sieve (Surf fins) and Waterhaul (Sunglasses & Beach clean-up kits) with whom we produced and created bespoke products, films, content experiences and activations that celebrate their stories – inspiring viewers to rethink their movement, and demonstrate Kia’s EV range.
As part of this process, we led the remote 3 week production (everywhere from Cascais to Cornwall) with 3rd party production partners, local fixers, make-up crews, talent, and caterers to ensure fluidity and seamless production.
We then edited and produced content for local markets to activate. To ensure our activation was inline with the master brand, we worked with Kia’s internal creative team, and their partners at Innocean. These collaborations allowed us to stay consistent yet iconic, providing the base for a recognisable brand presence.
We also produced a dedicated web presence for the campaign and the brands commitments. Here, we engaged with their digital partner Saasfee, who we collaborated with to design a custom landing page inline with their builds and timelines (critically doing so in the easiest and least disruptive manner).
To make the site and films a little more exciting, we added bespoke 3D models of the products we made into the mix. We reached out to Studio Exakt, who helped us bring custom, pixel perfect mock ups of our innovations to life in an interactive and engaging way.
As we looked to the roll out we partnered with our sister agency – Samy Road – who produced a continental and local Influencer strategy and activation plan to amplify it. They helped each market identify key community leaders, concepted activations, managed contracts, and informed the ongoing influencer and event strategy.
Finally, we looked to our internal media partners at Thyga to build out a strategy and partnership plan for each local market to activate with their internal and continental partner, Havas Media. They provided guidance on audience opportunity and targeting, and inspired markets with media partner opportunities with everyone from Vice to Surfline.
Overall, the key challenge was keeping each partner updated as the concept evolved and improved – we kept identifying new and exciting opportunities that impacted existing timelines, but by owning the roll out across partners, our production team kept the activation on point, on time, and on budget.
