Long-term partners Volkswagen South Africa (VWSA) and Ogilvy Cape Town have recently launched Street Quest, an innovative campaign that combines Facebook with Google's Street View to create an online game. The campaign, a digital interpretation of the family car game 'punch buggy', originated from the agency's digital team and is aimed at showing just how prolific Volkswagen is in South Africa.
The game uses Facebook as a platform through which players navigate Street View to find and 'pin' as many Volkswagen vehicles as they can from all over South Africa. By pinning the vehicles, players increase their points and win weekly prizes from Apple as well as a chance to play in the Grand Final. This event takes place in Cape Town and sees the four weekly winners take to the streets to 'pin' Volkswagens in a live playoff armed with a camera, a full tank of petrol and a film crew.
In existence since May 2007, Street View is a feature of Google Maps that allows people to explore the world through 360-degree high-definition street-level photographs. As a result of this level of detail, Street View lends itself perfectly to creating a truly immersive gaming experience.
"The Street View platform has not received much attention from marketers locally and, certainly, we've not used it in this way before. While this has meant that there were a number of new challenges, by using Street View we were instantly provided with hi-def images and scenery that would usually have to be painstakingly developed at huge expense," comments Nicholas Wittenberg, Head of Digital at Ogilvy Cape Town.
The campaign has allowed the agency to kick-start VWSA's Facebook brand page and social media presence as well as being a chance for it to really engage with the VW fans and customers by meeting them on their territory, on their terms. Since the launch of the game three weeks ago, the Facebook fan page has received over 10 000 likes, over 250 000 VWs have been pinned in the game, and, due to popular demand, the game is now also available to play on android phones, iPhones and tablets.
The campaign runs for six weeks from 9 July, for further details visit Volkswagen's Facebook brand page ().