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Designing your new car with Facebook Instant Experience

29 June 2021

Škoda, a Czech motor manufacturer founded in 1895, increased brand awareness and purchase consideration using Facebook Instant Experience to deliver an immersive car configuration tool for its new Octavia car model.

One of the world’s longest-established car manufacturers, Škoda has been part of the Volkswagen Group since 1991. Last year, Škoda announced the fourth generation of its Octavia family car at a time when the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was restricting physical sales activity. Car configurators are becoming an essential part of buying cars, and Škoda wanted to advertise the launch of its new Octavia model in a way that reflected the car’s new connected technology.

Designing the Perfect Car

Working with ZeroLight, which specialise in Cloud-based 3D visualisation for automotive sales & marketing, Škoda created a car configurator for the Octavia that could be paired with the full-screen Instant Experience format on Facebook. The Instant Experience format on Facebook is made for Mobile. It eases the customer journey by loading instantly within the Facebook app, rather than sending you to external websites that can take on average 15 times longer to load.

Škoda’s media agency PHD, its creative agency Optimist and Facebook then worked together to make it happen. The Zerolight Instant Experience-based configurator was delivered across 19 European markets, with media agency Carat running the solution in Norway.

Taking people through a guided, four-step journey to choose their preferred Octavia configuration and options, including exterior colour, wheel trim and interior style selection, the Instant Experience was impressive. It even displays a video of the configuration which concludes with a call to action inviting people to continue to the Škoda website to finish the experience. 

Impressed by the results of the campaign, Škoda intends to make the Instant Experience configurator essential for future launches, especially its planned Enyaq electric SUV launch in 2021.

The Results of the Campaign

Škoda’s Instant Experience attracted many new potential customers and achieved a significant impact on brand and performance outcomes. Tobias Talmon L’Armee, the Head of Global Communication Content and Strategy at Škoda commented on the success of The Instant Experience highlighting that “such engaging, immersive formats deliver meaningful information to our customers” and noted that they “are a necessary element of our future communication.”

The campaign achieved:

  • A 47% decrease in cost per completed car configuration and a 5.5-point lift in purchase consideration in Denmark. 
  • A 37% decrease in cost per completed car configuration in the Czech Republic, compared to business-as-usual photo and video ad campaigns.
  • A 14-point lift in ad recall in France and Italy.
  • An 18-point lift in ad recall in Norway.
  • A 7.5-point lift in brand awareness in Poland.

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