Audi Moves to Tumblr With Its #WantAnR8 Contest

This year, the brand’s #WantAnR8 contest moves to Tumblr and asks fans to create a video rather than simply compose a tweet.

audi-wantanr8German luxury car brand Audi has brought back its #WantAnR8 contest for the third time, giving fans the chance to drive its R8 model.

This year, however, fans are invited to prove their R8 devotion on Tumblr from October 23 to November 10.

In order to participate, fans can visit the #WantAnR8 Tumblr page to access video footage and the online video creation platform WeVideo to compose a video of an R8 doing a lap at the Sonoma Raceway in California. Users can select video clips from the starting line, turns, straights and finish line.

WeVideo comes with three interfaces that cater to users with a range of video editing skills.

“If you’re a super video editor, it has filters and features, but if you’ve never done it before, you can drag and drop and upload your first-ever YouTube video,” says Andrew Elliott, social media specialist at Audi of America. “In our minds, we’re trying to level the playing field of content creation.”

As of November 5, the #WantAnR8 campaign had generated about 265 entries in two separate YouTube playlists.

However, according to an Audi rep, the total number of entries was 301 as the brand has to review and approve each video before it can be published into public playlists.

Fans post their videos to YouTube and Twitter with the hashtag #WantAnR8. According to Audi, previous years’ winners will select the next winner who will choose either one day with the 2014 R8 in their hometown or a weekend trip to the Audi sportscar experience in Sonoma.

Audi switched to Tumblr from Twitter this year because in part “content creation capabilities have increased for the individual,” Elliott says. “If you look at the latest iPhone, you can have slow-mo video capture. Anyone out there is creating high quality content and we want to make sure we’re progressing as a brand.”

The move to Tumblr also reflects an effort to differentiate Audi from what Elliott describes as “copycat content of this similar format of ‘tweet why you want something and we’ll give it to the best response,'” as Audi has asked its fans to do in previous #WantAnR8 campaigns.

“We wanted to up the game. Our community has a lot of smart, sophisticated people in it and we see people remixing content on a regular basis,” Elliott says. “[So Audi wanted to know,] ‘What if we gave them the tools to go bigger and better?'”

Audi’s #WantAnR8 campaign started in 2011 when “we had a super fan just tweet at us how much she wanted the car over and over and over again and we surprised her with one of the vehicles at her house, which sparked the thought, ‘How can we make this moment have even more of an impact?'” Elliott says.

According to Elliott, the R8 is an aspirational car that appeals to both auto enthusiasts and casual fans. What’s more, this campaign in particular speaks to an enthusiastic fan base that includes one consumer who created a WordPress blog with a timeline of the history of the vehicle.

In addition, Elliott says the #WantAnR8 hashtag has been used 100,000 times in the last two years, making it one of the most successful recent Twitter campaigns, Audi says.

Audi has not used any paid media to push the campaign, which generated 80 submissions in the first four hours and 200 in the first four days, Elliott says.

“I think what’s so exciting is that we turned a copywriting contest with a cool tweet into something that is a much bigger challenge,” Elliott adds.

According to Audi, its 2014 R8 model “represents the pinnacle of Audi performance” with an available new seven-speed S tronic transmission and new full-LED headlamp design.

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