The Digital Agency of the Year award is jointly presented to Proximity China and Goodstein & Partners. It is usually awarded to the agency that obtained the highest aggregate score from points allocated across all of the separate categories, and this year’s award is a joint win because the executive creative director of Goodstein & Partners Georg Warga headed the project for “The People’s Car” sitting in the office of Proximity China leading its creative team. The duo scored across a range of categories picking up three gold and three silver awards for their entry submitted for Volkswagen (The People’s Car).

They won the Gold award for the Automotive and B2C sectors and Website category; Silver award for the Online Marketing, Best Integrated Media and Best Use of Social Media categories; and Platinum award for the Special category. As the brand name for Volkswagen in German literally means “The People’s Car”, Volkswagen wanted to harness the power of crowd-sourcing to inspire the Chinese to develop their own ideas about cars and ultimately customise and co-create the next “People’s Car with Volkswagen engineers and designers.

Volkswagen anchored the program on a first-of-its-kind online dialog platform that delivered interactive 3D tools that realized and showcased these ideas, which were shared, commented and voted upon to extract the best and most unique ones for evaluation. The platform was socially enabled - integrating content and functionality with all major social networks to facilitate seamless exchanges between Volkswagen’s platform and existing social communities. This required a drastic shift in Volkswagen’s overall business strategy: instead of building cars FOR the people, cars will be built WITH the people.

In the first year, Volkswagen planned to launch multiple thematic campaigns to stimulate dialogue on highly topical subjects on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. To inspire the people Volkswagen set out to reset everything they knew about cars with the creation of the “Flubber Car”. Flubber Car personalities were introduced via online films, and viral videos kick-started the online conversation. Web-TV episodes sparked engagement on video sharing sites. The virtual was made real by bringing life-size Flubber Cars into local neighbourhoods. Flubber Cars were put into people’s hands via augmented reality, interactive kiosks and physical models. Program execution was fully integrated across paid, earned and owned media on online, mobile advertising, SEM, OOH, TV platforms.

Volkswagen regularly reviewed the ideas to innovate on current cars and shape future ones. Within 10 weeks after the launch on 19 May 2011, Volkswagen achieved the highest share of any auto brand in social media. Brand innovation was increased by 18%, brand advocacy by 22%. The PR value of press coverage from 789 clippings was valued at US$8,017,317. Volkswagen also gained 263,040 Weibo followers and 2,944,360 fans on SNS sites. Most importantly, 52,613 ideas for “The People’s Car” were submitted, generating 452,015 votes. These results gave Volkswagen the perfect conditions to create an open-innovation program that would change how cars are designed, developed and marketed in China.