#defenderjourneys

In April 2015 I was representing my employer Connect at a round table status meeting with the other Land Rover digital agencies. One of the projects was a year of celebration to mark the end of production for the iconic Defender (at least the current generation.) Sevil Crespo who heads up the social media account at The Brooklyn Brothers had an ambitious project she was trying to sell to JLR. The early working name was the world according to Land Rover or Defender Journeys.

The idea was a participative social campaign where Defender owners and fans celebrate the journeys they have completed and the memories those experiences created. The brand’s rich heritage in expeditions would be used to start things off with curated content, the rest of the content would all be user generated – with an aim of two thousand created over a three year period. For many reasons I was interested in the campaign – including my own fond memories of growing up in a cold, noisy, uncomfortable and lovely Series II.

Before it was sold in to the seniors at Land Rover lots of technical questions had to be answered – how would we modify the Google Maps technology to deliver the campaign? We studied the Porsche GTS community website – a nice industry example that proved that their community trusted the brand enough to ‘hand over’ their routes. We needed to go one step further in our campaign and allow users to plot offroad sections to their journeys (the clear USP of both the vehicle and campaign.) Many other questions remained – how would we capture such complex data, moderate and faithfully recreate? Would people take the time to craft their journeys as we hoped? What practical terms of use could be used for such subjective content with a global audience of uber fans? To answer these questions Land Rover agreed to a prototyping phase to prove it was possible technically and sensible commercially to continue.

We met with the Google Maps specialist vendor gPartner to validate our ideas were possible, affordable and legal contractually. They confirmed all was good if architected correctly and affordable through a pay-on-demand model. They were excited to see how we could use their tech in a new way in the campaign and predictably very keen to show Land Rover what else they had to offer. So with access to developer tools we created a rough proof of concept to generate on and offroad routes and capture the polyline of co-ordinates. We developed some initial wireframes and suggested UX – how a fan would create a profile for themselves, their vehicle and their journey, where they went, what they saw and how they would describe it. Finally we mapped out the technology and process needed. Five parties would be involved – The Brooklyn Brothers guided the original concept and the campaign’s social media activation, Land Rover’s joint venture / in house agency Spark44 would lead the web design, Connect would build the whole experience, JLR’s data management provider Avoka had products designed to capture, securely store and allow moderation of the data and finally Enable – a specialist promotions agency would moderate the content and liaise with users (in the many countries and languages Land Rover operate in.)

The conclusion of the prototyping phase was that it was entirely possible. It was ambitious and exciting both creatively an technologically. It was new ground for Land Rover in using UGC on their main brand website landrover.com. Connect had implemented third party kit from Bazaar Voice and Storystream that allowed Land Rover to curate fan’s content from Instagram (and elsewhere) and present elegantly on LR.com. But this was the first time we were using personal tales from owners and fans in comms in such a way. It was new and fairly complex and I wasn’t sure if Land Rover would commit to delivering it. And they didn’t immediately. From July to September it went very quiet while other pressures dominated and it seemed Defender Journeys would remain just another great idea.

But thanks to a bit of luck and circumstance, in October Defender Journeys kicked off in a major way – with all five parties committing resource to a programme of work. Our campaign was to go live on 29th January 2016 – the day the last Defender rolled from the production line in Solihull. There were many unforseen challenges and false starts alogn the way – even a whole redesign of the data capture form part way through delivery.

Luckily I forgot the drama and late nights when the campaign came together – there was so much media interest in the end of the Defender and the debate on what the replacement could be, our campaign picked up a lot of interest from day 1. The first ‘real’ journey was submitted some four hours after we went live and they have come steadily since then thanks to the many Landy fans out there – from the casual to the truly eccentric. At the time of writing (22 days after going live) 111 user generated journeys have been approved and gone live on the site – spanning the globe and every terrain imaginable. The quality of the storytelling – in particular the stunning photography has pleasantly surprised everyone. My personal favourite is the incredible tale of a 9 month trip from London to Pakistan – living in a Land Rover with an 18 month old boy.