In 2023, the New York Festivals (NYF) launched a new automotive category group as a core component of their Advertising Awards. Our agency had the opportunity to partner with NYF to communicate this news. Seeing as this was the first ever NYF automotive awards, and given the innate human desire (and especially advertising desire) to see something new, for the very first time, we realized our concept: First Is Everything.
Through a targeted social media campaign, we brought to life iconic, first-of-its-kind automotive advertising that was truly groundbreaking. We turned some of automotive advertising’s greatest firsts like Honda’s “Cog”, “Musical Road”, and Saturn’s “Sheet Metal” into an animated social series inviting entrants to show us something we’ve never seen before. By paying homage to the great thinking in automotive advertising, we aimed to solidify the New York Festivals Auto Show as a premiere award show for the category.
To celebrate the first winners of the AUTOSHOW category group, we made custom Instagram stories for each gold, silver, and bronze winner. The stories were essentially and announcment and invite in one. We did a frame-by-frame announcment that directed the winner to the New York Festiveal headquarters to obatin their trophy.
All social assets were designed by creatives at our agency, so we had zero spend on sponsoring the New York Festivals AUTOSHOW ads and winner announcements.
The campaign achieved hundreds of thousands of views without so much as a media buy. And while we paid tribute to some of automotive advertising’s greatest “firsts”, hundreds of entrants competed to show us something we’d never seen before. The next “first” in an industry where First Is Everything.
