Porsche revs up social strategy with wedding stunt

Brief:

Porsche's "Sportscar Together" campaign that features couples expressing their love for the car brand is showcasing a real couple getting married in the backseat of a speeding Cayenne sports car. The real-life wedding took place on a racetrack at the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, the company announced in a blog post.
The stunt wedding, organized in partnership with The New York Times' T Brand Studio, will appear on Porsche's social media channels, a print ad on Nov. 18 and the newspaper's social media. A long-form video of the wedding went live on Nov. 7, MediaPost reported. In September, the Times ran a "save the date" ad by Porsche promoting the stunt.
The campaign kicked off last summer with Sportscar Together Day to help celebrate Porsche's 70th anniversary, along with a "Carpool Karaoke" segment with singer Adam Levine and late-night host James Corden in a Porsche Cayenne.

Insight:

Weddings are a popular source of user-generated content (UGC) on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, making Porsche's marriage stunt well suited for an extension of its "Sportscar Together" campaign. The Cayenne is the "most shareable" sportscar that Porsche sells, Chris Hanley, SVP and group account director at Cramer-Krasselt, told MediaPost. That makes the Cayenne ideal for social media, which has the core function of sharing experiences with friends, family and followers.

Porsche for several years has made social media a central part of its digital marketing strategy, encouraging fans to share and consume content from its website. The luxury car brand in 2015 used content curation tool Storystream to build microsites that showed fans car launches worldwide. It also developed a "car configurator" to help customers design their dream car and give them more personalized control over the brand experience. Porsche has five "experience centers," with a sixth planned for Germany, that aim to appeal to younger consumers who tend to seek and share authentic experiences that they can share on social media.

Among social media channels, Instagram skews toward a younger, more female audience. The U.S. audience for the Facebook-owned image-sharing app will grow 13.1% to 104.7 million people, or 31.8% of the population, according to researcher eMarketer, pointing to the massive reach Porsche could see by leveraging popular social platforms.