BACKGROUND

Honda is considered a serious manufacturer but produces boring bikes. 

The race, ‘24 Hours of Le Mans’ is the most prestigious endurance motorcycle race and considered as the place of re-enchantment for the brand, where it restores its image. It was very important to be able to reaffirm the sporting dimension of the brand and to beat the other manufacturers.

The 2022 edition had a high stake for our client Honda. 

If they won, they would become the most successful manufacturer in history.

Unfortunately, the team finished in third place.

Having watched Honda Moto lose at the doors of eternal recognition, we remembered a quote from Soichiro Honda: “Failing, is the only way to learn how not to fail”.

THE CREATIVE IDEA

We wanted to tell the story of a defeat. And for that we used the soul of the bike: its oil. Having watched Honda Moto lose at the doors of the eternal recognition, we could not help but think about this quote from Soichiro Hondza himself: “Failing, is the only way to learn how not to fail”. Keeping that deeply in mind, we chose meaningful photos from the 24h du Mans race which highlights key moments of the race and, for some, could even explain the failure. Our works showed the failure… to avoid failing again.

These screen-prints could be won by Honda Moto fans during a 24-hour race organized on Instagram by being the first commenting a post.

DESCRIBE THE STRATEGY

The strategy was to find a way to directly reach our consumers in a way that would excite them. We did this by organizing a 24-hour race on Honda’s Instagram page in order to target the motorcycling fans. We were able to post the matching prints to the exact time they happened in the race, creating the story of the race once more. The first comment of each post wins the screen-print.

DESCRIBE THE EXECUTION

Motorcycling is a passion. We knew that a story about the defeat of a great manufacturer would excite the entire motorcycle community. 

We took more than 4500 pictures during the 24 hours race. Then, we collected the engine oil from the bike that participated in the race. We used this oil as ink to write our story. We screen-printed 24 images transcribing the joys, the doubts, the disappointments of the Honda team.

We developed our own process with a specialized screen-print laboratory to be able to use our engine oil as ink. Tests after tests, fails after fails, we made sure to find the right composition to create our unique screen-prints with this oil.

The screen-prints (60 x 80 cm) were exposed at the motorcycle show in Lyon.

LIST THE RESULTS

The social campaign only lasted 24 hours but generated records in terms of KPI

•          +17% followers,

•          144k interactions,

•          45k engagements,

•          Hundreds of comments and stories about it.

This campaign is considered the most efficient one for the brand as it had the most social interactions in Honda’s history.

Besides, we set up a one-time exhibition of the screen-prints in February 2023 during a professional show and it ended up driving lots of people to the brand’s stand. In 4 days, the stand reached records of frequentation of 110k visitors.