A case study by Hyundai and Radio Energy: How to spend a weekend with a brand

In the summer, Hyundai launched the Drive in Summer project, which gave motorists and others the chance to travel around Russia on pre-selected routes lasting from one day to one week. This new case study narrates how the team and the Gazprom-Media Sales House scaled the project up, attracted the young audience, and ensured broad outreach in various media channels.

Tasks

Charge listeners with energy and positive feelings.

Encourage travel on Hyundai’s routes.

Engage the audience in brand activities and improve loyalty.

Solution

As part of Hyundai Motor CIS’s project, the hosts of Radio Energy’s show “Joysticks” traveled several of Hyundai’s routes to visit the sights of our country, and they shared their experience and impressions on social media. Listeners and anyone else who followed the hosts’ journeys could take part in contests and win nice and useful prizes from the automaker.

Brands can be presented in the travel territory not only on tourist TV programs, but also on the radio, both on air and digital. The Drive in Summer special project has proven this. The project combined the character of Radio Energy and the modern style of the Hyundai brand.

Traveling with Radio Energy hosts and the Hyundai brand

The idea of the project was to encourage listeners during the border closures and to motivate them to take weekend trips out of town. Bogdan Kantemirov and Roman Mironov, the hosts of Radio Energy’s show “Joysticks”, served as training guides for listeners. They introduced the audience to the Hyundai brand’s routes and to the sights and cities of Russia.

Especially for Radio Energy listeners, the hosts explored tourist sights every weekend for four weeks and tested in practice several types of crossovers from the automaker’s model range: Hyundai’s Palisade, Santa Fe, and Tucson. The project selected two-day travel routes which might be traveled together with friends, family, as a couple, or alone. During the evening show, the radio hosts talked about the magic of road trips and peculiar features of the road and shared their impressions of the trip.

The project was announced both on the air and via digital platforms. Radio Energy’s schedule of Hyundai mentions was complemented with:

announcement videos and oral liners

Energy News releases about the project’s routes

releases of Travel Diaries chronicling the trips

special headlines about the prize draw and photo contest

The radio station’s website and social media pages were used for digital promotion:

There were videos and photo reports about the trips published on Radio Energy’s social media accounts which shared the hosts’ emotions.

A branded landing page was created on the Radio Energy website which featured audio pre-roll with a Hyundai product video and a banner. Clicking on it would take users to the brand’s page.

In addition, the account of DJ Simon, the host of Radio Energy’s “Show with Black Pepper”, published videos of the “rap-hearsal” of the trips. These were rap-groove announcements of the upcoming trips. They were tagged with the Hyundai account tag and links to the Hyundai World app.

Prize draw and photo contest

To engage listeners, the Radio Energy team and the Hyundai brand organized a draw of prizes from the manufacturer and a photo contest on a popular social network.

Subscribers to the official Radio Energy and Hyundai Russia pages had a chance to win a branded travel box. To enter, participants had to leave comments with the names of their cities and tag a friend under a post of a rap video about the Drive in Summer project. The video posts were published on the radio station’s feed, and they could also be viewed via links in DJ Simon’s stories.

On the evening show the day before each trip, Bogdan Kantemirov and Roman Mironov randomly selected six subscriber comments, who won Hyundai travel boxes for themselves and for their friends.

After the weekend, the radio station’s account published photos taken by the hosts against the background of iconic tourist locations. Listeners were invited to take part in the contest by posting photos taken in the same locations to their profiles. The participants were required to tag all the people in the image and to include the hashtags #rulikakmy and #ruliletom (#руликакмы and #рулилетом). All listeners who fulfilled the conditions, and their friends in the photos, received branded prizes from Hyundai.