Harley Davidson Embarks on Crowdsourced Campaign
Last November, iconic motorcycle maker Harley Davidson showed the world that even the most classic of brands need to stay current, when they enlisted crowdsourcing-based advertising-agency Victor & Spoils, after releasing Carmichael Lynch, their primary agency for the past 31 years.
This week the first media effort to come from that partnership has been released, first on YouTube, to be followed with cable TV spots later in the week. The video, called “No Cages,” promotes Harley’s HD1 customization program, in which buyers can design their own rides, which was launched earlier this month. The video was the idea of Kentuckian, Whit Hyler, described as a “passionate amateur.”
AdAge.com featured an interview with Harley Chief Marketing Officer Mark-Hans Richer about the new piece, which contained some interesting perspectives on innovation in the field of advertising.
When asked if the brand was nervous about hiring “the crowd”, Richer replied “We’re willing to take risks but you want to mitigate those. So we ran through the [V&S] process a couple times on some lower-level stuff … put a couple lower-level creative briefs in the system to see what we’d get and were so impressed with the quality of that work, the expansiveness of the ideas that we became comfortable this would be a workable model.”
Interestingly, Victor and Spoils issued the call for submissions in September, shortly after Harley’s split with Carmichael Lynch, as a way to get Harley Davidson’s attention. Richer was quick to point out that much of value of using V&S came their ability to “curate” ideas, or to vet submissions and polish to the finalist.
“We… have moved past the idea that there’s a lead agency,” said Richer. “The majority of our marketing dollars are spent in experiential. We want powerful ideas that drive all of that and we’ve learned through this that those can come from this new model. With us, it’s (crowdsourcing) not a promotional thing but an everyday philosophy we’ve had for a long time — we are radically customer-led.”
While the HD1 mass customization project isn’t necessarily a new concept, it gives the brand a new level of interaction – allowing even who can’t quite yet afford a Harley to experiment with the tool and create their own designs, keeping them engaged and enthusiastic.
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