In Spain Vodafone’s McLaren F1 drivers were turned in to superheroes in a new comic book campaign leveraging the telco’s rights at the Spanish Grand Prix.
The online comic, called ‘Blessed Evil’ (Benditos Malvados), is hosted on the website of the same name and creatively aims to reflect the F1 season’s action in a graphic format.
In the comic the Vodafone McLaren drivers take their rivalry to the track as the graphic story chronicles the season on the circuit and offers up a new chapter after every Grand Prix.
Drivers Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton are the super hero-style stars of the graphic story and their comic avatars take on a half-man/half-machine type form. The creative style and the story aims to highlight the different characters of the two drivers in the struggle for the leadership of the world.
The two world champions, accompanied by the comic’s creator and young Spanish illustrator Daniel Sampere, unveiled the comic’s prologue in Barcelona in the week before the Grand Prix of Spain at the Circuit de Catalunya.
At the presentation both drivers joked about their favourite superheroes and superpowers, as well as the super-capacitors necessary to be able to drive a F1 car.
The initiative also enables fans to digitally interact with the comic’s content via the microsite, or through social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter.
Users can be part of the experience and are offered the change to customise elements such as name the comic’s chapters. At the end of the F1 season all the chapters will be pulled together into a single graphic novel style comic and published in paper.
Consumer who participate with the campaign are entered into a competition to appear as a character in an episode of the comic, win Grand Prix tickets and even spend a day with the Vodafone McLaren team.
The campaign was developed by Shackleton (Spain) and is supported by a TV spot and work across other channels. To date the TVC has been viewed almost 100,000 times on YouTube.
Comment:
The innovative activation is creatively distinct and benefits from impressive production values and eye catching artwork.
But the depth and pull of the interactive elements for consumers are less compelling. Perhaps if users had been able to carve out their own plotlines or direct the action a little more it would have been more of an immersive and satisfying experience.
There are certainly similarities between this campaign and the Axe Anarchy initiative – see www.axeanarchy.com
See the ‘Making Of’ video of the Axe comic campaign below.
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