At The Future of Brands event, one standout session took delegates inside one of the UK’s biggest automotive branding campaigns of the past year. With speakers from Volkswagen UK, media agency PhD, and cross-media measurement specialists On Device, the panel offered a look at how the brand tackled a shifting market, delivered an emotionally-resonant campaign, and measured its performance across every media touchpoint.
Understanding the brand challenge
The automotive sector is undergoing rapid transformation, spurred by the rise of electric vehicles and a wave of new market entrants, particularly from China. Despite Volkswagen’s stronghold as the UK’s number one new car sales brand for four consecutive years, the company recognised it could not take its position for granted.
The challenge, as outlined by Volkswagen UK’s Head of Marketing Sarah Cox-Thornley, was to maintain and grow brand consideration, ensuring Volkswagen remained front of mind for consumers considering their next car. Research conducted with Kantar at the end of 2023 revealed that brand likeability was the single biggest driver of consideration. While this may seem intuitive, it was a critical insight that shaped the campaign strategy.
The resulting creative platform, developed with Adam & Eve/DDB, was “Your Volkswagen”, a campaign rooted in the literal meaning of the brand name — the people’s car. Every person featured in the campaign was a genuine Volkswagen customer, and every story was authentic. The idea was to tap into the emotional connection and nostalgia that so many people in the UK already have with the brand.
Building emotional resonance across platforms
Translating this emotional platform into media was the responsibility of PhD, and Managing Partner Louise Twycross-Lewis shared how they did it. The campaign was built around two core ideas — “breadth of love” and “depth of love”. Breadth was about reaching as wide an audience as possible, while depth focused on telling powerful, emotive stories that would resonate on a more personal level.
TV was the starting point. The hero ad, set to the nostalgic tune of Thank You for Being a Friend, ran in 60-second spots during prime-time programming such as Britain’s Got Talent and the Premier League. PhD also used Samba TV technology to identify and retarget audiences through video-on-demand platforms, with premium placements across ITVX, All4, Prime Video, and Discovery+.
Connected TV was also a major part of the mix, with a homepage takeover on LG Smart TVs helping the brand reach viewers in newer digital environments. Meanwhile, digital OOH extended the brand’s presence into public spaces.
When it came to delivering emotional depth, social media took centre stage. Volkswagen produced 14 long-form video stories featuring real customers sharing their personal Volkswagen journeys. These were distributed through Meta’s Storyteller format, TikTok TopView, and other platforms. Timely executions — like a Father’s Day campaign across digital out-of-home and social — helped reinforce the brand’s message and relevance.
Measuring what matters across a fragmented media landscape
With such a complex, multi-touchpoint campaign, understanding which channels were driving real impact was essential. As Sarah Robson, Head of Advertising Effectiveness, On Device explained, the challenge was to measure consistently across all media types and platforms — something that has historically been difficult to achieve.
To do so, On Device combined passive exposure methodologies with its first-party consumer panel. Social media exposure was tracked using metering technology, while TV and VOD were measured using ACR (automatic content recognition). Out-of-home campaigns were measured through SDK-enabled location tracking matched against digital play-out reports.
This approach made it possible to deduplicate exposures, isolate channel effects, and directly compare the performance of each medium. For Volkswagen, this meant the campaign could be judged not just on overall uplift, but on the specific contributions of each channel.
The results and what they reveal
The campaign delivered strong results. Brand love rose by four percentage points overall, with a 12-point uplift among 18 to 34-year-olds and an eight-point increase among 35 to 44s. Brand favourability increased by seven points among exposed audiences, and brand consideration rose by four points.
Perhaps most significantly, purchase intent — a notoriously difficult metric to shift — rose by four points, 1.5 times higher than On Device’s automotive category benchmark.
The data also revealed which channels drove which brand perceptions. TV delivered on trust and value, while social media excelled in building emotional connection, especially around friendliness and relatability. Out-of-home also contributed strongly to perceptions of warmth and brand accessibility.
A roadmap for future planning
What made this campaign stand out was not just its emotive storytelling or its seamless execution across platforms, but the clarity with which its success was measured. By combining creative consistency with precise cross-channel measurement, Volkswagen, PhD, and On Device were able to extract actionable insights that will shape future campaigns.
