The Volkswagen Group with its headquarters in Wolfsburg is one of the world’s leading automobile manufacturers and the largest car maker in Europe.

Volkswagen wanted to raise its brand awareness and drive website traffic to its local Italian website for its van line of commercial vehicles, by unleashing the power of audio in a new and innovative way.

The Volkswagen Group is made up of twelve brands from seven European countries: Volkswagen, Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Ducati, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Scania and MAN. The Volkswagen Group sells its vehicles in 153 countries.

ShakeMe™ is an audio format specifically designed to drive immediate action from app listeners and has a higher conversion rate than traditional audio-only or display advertising.

Through ShakeMe audio listeners are invited to shake or tap their phones in order to trigger an action while listening to an audio ad. When they shake their phones, listeners can download an app or coupon, place a call, add an event to the calendar, open a website, or invite a voice command. Listeners can interact directly with the ad without unlocking their phone or even looking at their screens.

For VW, the ShakeMe format was the right way to help raise brand awareness amongst audio listeners and drive traffic to their website.

The audio format was delivered to all the interactivity enabled radio stations in the Mediamond group: Radio 101, Radio 105 and Virgin Radio, in combination with AdsWizz’s AdWave network. Listeners were targeted using demographic data (age 25+) as well as behavioural targeting via our “car enthusiast” and “In market Car buyers” segments.

The outcome was an advertisement on national Italian radio that sounded like an automotive ad, engaging the audiences when they were listening to their favourite music on their mobile apps, and raising their curiosity by adding an interactive element.

Interactive ads such as ShakeMe are activated via AdsWizz’s Software Development Kit (SDK).