Volvo’s Reddit Campaign Calls on Community to Share Terrifying Car Crash Stories

When Volvo's marketing team was considering how to spark a conversation about the brand’s safety record, Reddit might have seemed like an odd fit, but to the Swedish automaker, the connection felt natural. For one thing, ensuring safety is an attribute for which both brands strive to be known. But Reddit has become a place where Volvo has a fanbase: The subreddit devoted to the car company has 41,000 users already talking about the brand. So posting an activation on that platform allowed Volvo to target an already engaged community of fans and encourage participation at scale. The promoted post to the Volvo subreddit asked users to share a personal story: “After Volvo introduced the three-point safety belt in 1959, it was called stupid and seen as a violation. Since then it has saved more than a million lives. Tell us about a time the safety belt or another safety feature in your car saved your life, and we'll reward you with Reddit Platinum.” That call-to-action was answered by thousands. The post, dubbed A Million More and placed in the car’s driving and car-buying subreddits, received 2,500 comments from people describing their accidents and how safety features likely saved their lives. It also received 18,500 total upvotes (Reddit’s version of a thumbs-up) and resulted in more than 1,000 platinum awards (Reddit’s highest honor, which enables winners to browse ad-free and hang in the elusive Reddit lounge). Reddit Zeroes In on Search “It blew all of the benchmarks out of the water,” Leigh Moynihan, head of marketing at Volvo Car USA, said. “Even I was blown away.” Reddit called the results “staggering.” They set the engagement benchmark at 1.21%; the campaign achieved 1.31%. The comment page view rate was 1.05%, exceeding Reddit’s benchmark of 0.92%; the campaign also garnered an overall comment rate 11,890% above Reddit’s benchmark of 0.0001% at 0.148%. Perhaps the best indicator, though, is Volvo USA’s sales. The company reported a 185.5% increase in sales from April 2021 over 2020, which is a new April sales record; first quarter earnings beat expectations. “Volvo sales in the United States have been nothing but staggering,” Richard Amies, the business leader of Mindshare’s Volvo account, told Adweek. “The first thing anyone who has been exposed to an advertising campaign is likely to do is an internet search. Searches are a really good proxy for performance measurement." While Amies said he can't give numbers that aren't on the public record, he said that Q1 sales performance is "exceptional," adding, "Initiatives like this led to a staggering kind of engagement. It’s not the only thing we’re doing, but it’s a significant contribution to that success.” Hearing from accident survivors The post was accompanied by a nearly two-minute black-and-white short that features accident survivors reading the public’s reaction to the seatbelt when it was first introduced. “Wearing a seatbelt is a terrible idea,” reads an elementary school aged girl named Molly. “No one can tell me what to do with my life,” Amy reads in Chinese. Those voiceovers continue as footage of engineers testing the seatbelt on dummies is shown. Then, accident survivors describe their own crashes. They speak about the sound of metal smashing and glass shattering. They describe their fear: Did the baby survive? Is my brother injured? And finally, there’s gratitude when they realize that the seat belt likely saved their lives. Volvo drives the point home with the text: “To date, the safety belt has saved more than a million lives. In 2020, we introduced speed limits on all our new cars. As the next step, we will introduce in-car cameras to prevent intoxicated and distracted driving. So we can save a million more.” A Million More’s origin “A Million More” launched on Reddit the second half of 2020. The goal was to raise awareness about Volvo’s safety record and introduce forthcoming safety technology. Volvo marketers wanted to approach the brand campaign with “story-doing,” not storytelling. Moynihan explained the concept to Adweek: “Instead of us as a brand talking to people about safety and what we believe our view on safety is, we wanted to make space for our community, our brand fans and other people that we haven't connected with, to help tell the story. For us, it feels very natural to engage the community, because we are a very human-centric brand and appreciate that two-way dialogue.” Reddit, a platform of millions of topic-driven communities called subreddits that allow users to vote on the quality of a thread, was chosen because Volvo could engage users in an authentic conversation about the brand. “When a brand really takes interest in what you care about, how you feel, and how they've impacted your life, it really comes to life,” Mary Ann Belliveau, head of large customer sales at Reddit, told Adweek. “That's the unique part about Reddit. People really want to have conversations.” And they did. One commenter explained that her two Volvos were stolen from the driveway. The police woke the family in the middle of the night, saying they’d found the cars, which had been raced and resulted in a crash into a wooded creek. Both cars were totaled. That comment prompted numerous responses, from one commenter offering condolences on losing two beloved cars to another saying he grew up with the same model Volvo before his dad sold it with nearly 500,000 miles driven on it. The conversation between commenters was particularly interesting and powerful to the marketers, added Moynihan. Participants had a lot to say: The average comment length was almost two times the Reddit benchmark, at 417 characters compared to 243. “What I thought was super interesting was that people really want to talk to each other,” Belliveau said. Moynihan said users spent more time on Volvo website, explored more pages and submitted a request to learn more or get in contact with a retailer to ultimately transact. The campaign also included an installation featuring portraits of 15 crash survivors whom all credit the three-point safety belt with saving their lives. The images, taken by photographer Martin Schoeller, were displayed at Fotografiska New York, an outpost of the original Stockholm museum, from late March to April; they're now on view at Volvo’s Mahwah, N.J. campus.