Redwood Mazda video hits over half a million plays

A video created for Mazda has received over 500,000 plays in its first week on YouTube, after a promotional campaign driven by the Redwood team.

The video pitted a new Mazda2 car against the fabled wall of death, and in addition to over half a million plays across several YouTube channels gathered over 1,000 likes on YouTube, over 500 tweets and was shared over 200 times on Facebook, making it a big viral hit for the car company.

The promotional campaign for the video made extensive use of the Redwood Mazda account team’s editorial contacts. This lead to it being featured on popular car sites such as TopGear.com, Autoblog, and Jalopnik. It was also picked up by key trend-spotting sites including Cool Hunting and Trendhunter, and it led to a feature on the science of driving a car around a wall of death on Wired.com. In the UK, coverage even reached the national newspapers, with the video featuring in the Daily Telegraph.

In addition to the main video, the team also created a behind-the-scenes mini-feature telling the story of how the stunt was achieved and how it was filmed.

According to Nik Berg, editor of Mazda Zoom Zoom magazine, the key to the video’s success was simply the quality of the content. “We created something that we thought would be fun and that people would actually want to see and share. Then we made sure that it was in the right places online,” he said.

Redwood has worked with Mazda since 2007, producing the multi-award winning Zoom Zoom programme. Zoom Zoom is Mazda’s multiple award-winning international customer magazine, distributed to 1.5 million owners in over 30 countries and in seven languages. Zoom Zoom comes out three times a year in print, e-zine and mobile versions, telling Mazda stories to a worldwide audience.

With a core of shared content, produced in close conjunction with Mazda’s global brand marketing division in Japan, Zoom Zoom also features tailored local content developed with each individual market. This ensures a strong global tone of voice together with local relevance.