Case Study
Volkswagen Veicoli Commerciali and Amazon Ads take customers on an Italian road trip on board the ID. Buzz Cargo
Goals
- Volkswagen wanted to launch its brand-new commercial vehicle, the ID.Buzz Cargo.
- They wanted to highlight the key features of the vehicle: sustainability, innovation, and an iconic design.
Approach
- With the Brand Innovation Lab, Volkswagen Veicoli Commerciali created a 20-minute documentary titled Charge Your Brand.
- The documentary was released on Prime Video, alongside three additional short episodes available on Fire TV.
- A landing page on Amazon.it provided links to purchase from the featured Made in Italy companies, and book a test-drive.
- The campaign also featured an interactive Brand Experience with Alexa.
Results
- 33M impressions on Fire TV
- 24M impressions on Amazon DSP
- +14.7% Brand Awareness
- +6.8% Purchase Intent
With a multichannel strategy, Volkswagen achieved an increase in brand awareness (14.7%) and purchase intent (6.8%), showing how Amazon Ads can create meaningful brand stories for customers, helping brands engage audiences, while doing what they love on Prime Video, Alexa, Amazon Music, Twitch, Amazon DSP, and Fire TV.
For three Italian small businesses, the goal of preserving tradition, embracing sustainability, and innovating to create a successful enterprise can be a challenging balancing act. Volkswagen Veicoli Commerciali helped them manage that feat with their newest electric vehicle (EV), the ID. Buzz Cargo. Alongside the Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab (BIL), Volkswagen Veicoli Commerciali created a 20-minute documentary titled Charge Your Brand.
The brand-funded film, which launched on Prime Video in September 2023, follows host and digital entrepreneur Marco Montemagno as he travels across Italy in the ID. Buzz Cargo. While on the road, Montemagno visits these small businesses—Northern Italian furniture craftspeople Mobili Fiver, plant-based wellness brand Erbecedario, and organic winery Fattoria di Montemaggio—and shows them how the ID. Buzz Cargo can help brands like theirs take their business on the road.
The Made in Italy program, a collaboration between Amazon and the Italian Trade Agency that promotes the country’s entrepreneurship and international commerce, selected the three brands. In the film, someone from each small business takes a drive in the ID. Buzz Cargo, showing how the large storage space and EV design speak to their business needs and their commitments to sustainability. To underscore the small-business culture that thrives in Italy, Volkswagen Veicoli Commerciali and the BIL wanted to shine a spotlight on the local diversity of artisan produce and craftsmanship.
“With the increasing popularity of streaming TV, brand-funded content gives brands like Volkswagen an opportunity to connect with customers in an authentic way, while they are doing the things they enjoy,” said Kate McCagg, head of the BIL at Amazon Ads. “Through Charge Your Brand, we are putting the ID. Buzz Cargo at the heart of the content, while driving traffic to the program through a series of ads across Amazon Alexa, Amazon DSP, Fire TV, and Prime Video, helping the content reach relevant audiences, at the right time.”
Putting together a multichannel campaign
Volkswagen’s Charge Your Brand project encompassed a number of channels. The documentary was released on Prime Video, alongside three additional short episodes available on a dedicated Fire TV page that provided more details on each story.
In addition, the campaign included a landing page on Amazon.it that provided editorial and marketing content, as well as links to purchase products from the three featured “Made in Italy” companies. Through this page, audiences could learn more about the features from ID. Buzz Cargo and also book a test-drive with Volkswagen. The campaign also featured an interactive Brand Experience with Alexa that invited audiences to speak directly with the film’s host and access a link to the campaign hub to discover the full documentary.
Increasing brand awareness and purchase intent
Using this multichannel strategy helped Volkswagen maximize traffic and unique reach driven to each content piece. As a result, the campaign overachieved all the target key performance indicators in terms of impressions, clicks, views, and cost per view1.
The campaign delivered 33 million impressions on Fire TV, largely due to high-impact placements and targeted solutions from the teasing phase to the end of the campaign, along with 2.1 million impressions with audio ads on Alexa and Amazon Music, 24 million impressions on Amazon DSP, and 55.6 million impressions on display ads2.
Moreover, Volkswagen conducted a brand lift study with Lucid, to measure media impact and effectiveness. Results registered an increase in both brand awareness (14.7%) and purchase intent (6.8%)3, showing how Amazon Ads can create meaningful brand stories for customers, helping brands engage audiences, while doing what they love on Prime Video, Alexa, Amazon Music, Twitch, Amazon DSP, or Fire TV.
1-2 Amazon internal data
3 Lucid