How Mercedes-Benz Leveraged Brand24 to Monitor and Maximize the Success of Their Campaign and Quadrupled Time Spent on Dedicated Landing Page

Summary

Mercedes-Benz, together with agency BBDO WWA, prepared the campaign ‘The Mood Colors of Poland’ to promote the manufacturer’s first premium T-Class small van model in Poland. The campaign involved outdoor activities consisting of illuminating a selected floor of the company's headquarters in Warsaw and displaying the car in front of the building. Also, there was a nearby billboard illuminated accordingly. Eight colors were described with dozens of hashtags that expressed them (#joy, #love, #sadness, etc.).

In the next stage, using Brand24, the team monitored different internet sources. This part of the project required a small investment of time and money, high reliability of data, and a language filter to only find content written in Polish. Brand24 met all these criteria and helped the team track mentions throughout the campaign.

As a result, Brand24 collected nearly 200k mentions in two weeks. The campaign promoting the new T-Class was successful, quadrupling the time spent on the landing page dedicated to the small van.

600k

views under the campaign video on YouTube

longer time spent on the Mercedes T-class page

$50k

advertising value equivalent of the campaign

1. About the client

We spoke with:

MERCEDES-BENZ

Our client probably needs no introduction. Mercedes-Benz is one of the most recognizable car brands in the world. Its successive luxury car models have invariably stirred up excitement among automotive fans for decades, guaranteeing owners a powerful experience thanks to their innovative solutions.

But what happens if we push aside speed and luxury – and focus on space and safety instead? Will the car still have such a strong emotional appeal? And if not, what can the brand do about it?

It sounds abstract, but that's precisely the challenge the Mercedes-Benz team faced when the new car model – the Mercedes T-Class, a premium small van – entered the market. The car targets young families with children and focuses primarily on functionality and driving comfort. With speed and luxury out of the equation, the T-Class model was an ambitious marketing challenge.

We spoke with:

Mateusz Wojcik, Michael Hansen, Sylwia Sobol
Creative Team from BBDO WWWA

BBDO WWA

BBDO WWA is the agency that serves Mercedes-Benz as part of the global TeamX structures. Together, the teams set out to find common ground between the new, functional small wagon and the emotions the brand's cars have traditionally evoked.

The result was the idea of a marketing campaign linking the moods of Poles online with one of the hallmarks of the Mercedes T-Class – the multi-colored ambient interior illumination, which can be independently adjusted in the car.

2. Problem

The goal of the campaign was to promote the new car model. The assumptions were simple: the car must share the typical characteristics of other models of the brand – the ability to arouse emotions.

One of the stages was outdoor activities – illuminating the company's headquarters in Warsaw with colors corresponding to the car's ambient lights. The colors corresponded to the emotions Poles shared online the previous day. Each of the eight colors was assigned a specific emotion and hashtag that expressed it. In this way, dozens of keywords were created to be monitored daily across the internet.

This, therefore, involved a heavy emphasis on the timeliness of the data – the previous day's entries were to be collected and summarized by the evening hours of the following day. 'Every day between 19:00-00:00, we displayed the most popular color. We did this based on the previous day's data collected by Brand24 and ran through our algorithm.' – Michael Hansen, BBDO

Out-of-home advertising of Mercedes-Benz Campaign

In addition, targeting the campaign on the local market entailed some budget and time constraints. Therefore, the team sought to automate the process to increase productivity.

There was also the problem of the specificity of the data itself – the project was based on a survey of the sentiment of Poles, so it was important to filter out entries written in other languages. This made tracking problematic because Poles like to use anglicisms, especially in hashtags. Therefore, completely excluding words such as #love or #sad would have disrupted the integrity of the collected data.

The creative team needed an alternative to automate the process of monitoring all areas of the internet for Polish posts related to dozens of keywords. And to top it all off, the data had to flow in real-time.

We wanted to monitor Polish mentions and didn't want to encroach on the international sphere. At the same time, we realized that a lot of such English words creep into posts created by Poles.

Mateusz Wojcik

Senior Copywriter, BBDO WWA

3. Solution

The idea to use our tool came from Piotr Wojcik, who was responsible for the van's marketing communications at Mercedes-Benz. In turn, our Customer Success team helped prepare the designs and advised on how to optimize the settings so that the results would be in line with the survey objectives.

AUTOMATING THE PROCESS

Manually searching for mentions is a laborious and time-consuming task. Brand24, with its AI-based solutions and automated search of the internet's nooks and crannies, takes the burden off the user by gathering mentions from all publicly available sources in one place.

Example: Amount of mentions collected for keyword #love in less than three minutes

The BBDO team knew this. Instead of manually searching for the hashtags extracted in a proprietary study, they decided to back themselves with technology and automate the process.

The biggest benefit of Brand24 is reliability – we had no problems with the tool. It's intuitive. We knew we could trust the data it collects.

Michael Hansen

Senior Creative, BBDO WWA

SAVING TIME AND MONEY

Searching the internet for dozens of keywords daily seems like a Sisyphean task. But even if one were to take on such a challenge, it would require recruiting many volunteers – and that costs money.

Here is a quick estimate:

Our tool’s most extensive package costs $399/month. For a project that lasts less than two weeks – assuming it was previously tested for the same period – this would be the total amount for the whole campaign.

We had little time, and there was a lot of repetitive work. Brand24 helped us by collecting data from the internet for us. It greatly relieved us.

Mateusz Wojcik

Senior Copywriter, BBDO WWA

DATA UPDATE

Mercedes-Benz and BBDO WWA needed constant hashtag monitoring to show the mood of Poles the next day with different-colored illumination of the company's headquarters. With the help of Brand24's real-time data collecting, the team was able to adjust the building's illumination on a daily basis according to the survey results.

LANGUAGE SETTINGS

The final highlight of the project was the inclusion of the aforementioned 'Polishness.' The mentions the team was interested in were supposed to be written by Poles, but the hashtags surveyed also included English words.

Brand24 offers many features to help you customize your project. In the dashboard, for example, you can extract the source of mentions, check the sentiment of posts and their validity, or determine excluded words that you are not interested in. For the BBDO WWA team, however, the most helpful feature was the language filter, which allowed them to only collect mentions in the selected language (despite the English words they contained).

Projects settings for a '#love' project

We had reliable and up-to-date data from Brand24, which we monitored daily. The data was clear and easy to filter and interpret. Brand24 was the only source of information we used.

Michael Hansen

Senior Creative, BBDO WWA

4. Results

During the two weeks, the team monitored the data and lit up the building while the tool collected nearly 200,000 mentions that formed the basis for the follow-up survey.

'76 monitored keywords, 196,345 words counted – the organizers of the campaign 'scanned' the Polish internet to find out what social media users, forum and blog readers are thinking, talking about and experiencing,' we learn from a press release summarizing the campaign.

Here are some numbers from the project summary:

4x – that's how much the average time spent on the T-Class page increased compared to before the campaign
$50k – that's how much the advertising equivalent of the Mercedes-Benz T-Class was from articles and mentions of the campaign
600k – that's how many views the video summarizing the entire campaign had.

And how does the campaign sum up the people behind its success?

'The results of the campaign were outstanding. It even drew the attention of Mercedes teams from other countries.' – Mateusz Wojcik, BBDO WWA

'The strength of this project was the combination of offline and online actions with the help of data that was 'powered' by the emotions of Poles. We sourced the data from a wide range of media we researched with the help of Brand24. On top of that, we had a solid reference to product features. In the end, we are proud of the results. – Piotr Wojcik, Mercedes-Benz Polska

5. Recommendations

If you're reading this post, you're probably considering using Brand24 for a marketing campaign. When taking on such a challenge, follow the example of Mercedes-Benz and BBDO WWA:

Give yourself time to test the features, scope of information offered, and capabilities of the tool before setting up the actual project. 'It was beneficial that we had a test period in the tool. This allowed us, just before the action, to prepare for the data to be tested correctly. We could look at our data, whether there were correlations between them, whether there was something we saw that we hadn't considered before.' – Piotr Wojcik, Mercedes-Benz
Don't be afraid to ask our team for support if you have a problem with something. 'The contact with the team was of a high level. We received all the information we needed. If something couldn't be done, we were also informed about it. This allowed us to change some project assumptions painlessly.' – Mateusz Wojcik, BBDO WWA
Always set up the project a few days before the campaign launch. This will ensure that you have all the data you need to measure the campaign's performance effectively, and it will be possible to compare the results with those before the launch. If you still need historical data, write to us!

Hi!

Nice to see you scrolled all the way down here! Here at Brand24, we really enjoy hearing our customers' success stories. This assures us of the tool's utility and makes us proud that we can help you with whatever you use our tool for.

Maybe you also happen to use Brand24 in your day-to-day work and want to share your case with the world. If so, feel free to write me!

Till the next case study. Toodles!

Waleria Pagowska

Product Marketing Specialist

Table of content

How an Automotive Industry Leader Used Internet Monitoring to Promote the Latest Mercedes Model

Summary

1. About the client

2. Problem

3. Solution

4. Results

5. Recommendations

Table of content

Summary

1. About the client

2. Problem

3. Solution

4. Results

5. Recommendations

More on this

How Uber Increased Online Exposure by 24% with Social Listening

How Does Twitch Use Brand24 To Find Customer’s Insights?

900% Higher Conversion Rate: How We Helped TimeCamp Increase Website Traffic

How Brand24 Helped Extradom.pl Handle 170,000 Mentions