Volkswagen is building buzz for the release of its 2010 GTI with a campaign that relies heavily—and so far, solely—on getting the car built into a racing game designed for the iPhone.
Released last Thursday, Real Racing GTI is a free iPhone app that lets users race their their new GTI over a course designed by game developer Firemint for their “Real Racing” game, a paid version of which costs $6.99 at the iTunes App store. Registered users can post their times and game scores to their Twitter and Facebook accounts and put clips of their racing exploits up on YouTube. A leaderboard also keeps track of outstanding race times and scores.
Users who download the game and register can also get entered into a giveaway contest that will hand out special limited-edition versions of the 2010 GTI. The competition, which began Oct. 22, will choose a random player weekly for the next six weeks to win real-life versions of the customized GTI model used in the game. Players increase their chances of winning by playing the game more often. The Real Racing giveaway will end on Dec. 2, 2009.
Volkswagen says the campaign makes it the first car company to rely primarily on a smartphone campaign to introduce a new model in the U.S. the automaker used similar tactics to introduce its Polo and Scirocco models in Europe last September.
Volkswagen leadership maintains that rolling its new model out in a digital, mobile, socially-enabled format will reach its target audience “in a way that no 30-second spot ever could.”
“With the personalization of media and the challenges inherent with reaching constantly connected consumers, we tasked ourselves to rethink the way we launch vehicles in order to engage our consumers in a meaningful way,” Volkswagen of America vice president Tim Ellis said in a release. “The GTI customer is a tech-savvy consumer who enjoys social networking, playing games and spending time on mobile devices—most often on an iPhone.”
Other than branding surrounding the GTI race car, the only explicit marketing message included in the iPhone app is a dealer locator that indicates where players can get a look at the real VW GTI 2010 when it arrives in showrooms. Press reports say the company will later market through more automotive traditional media.
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