Brief:

• Volkswagen of America is running a campaign for its 2018 Tiguan that features a virtual scavenger hunt on Instagram, Facebook’s image-sharing application with 700 million users, Adweek reported. The “Rule the Road” game, which stars the inflatable gorilla from TV ads for the car, gives Instagram users a daily clue to help find a Tiguan hidden in a bustling city. The clues are available each day at 1 p.m. EDT on the @VWRuleTheRoadInstagram page.

• Contestants need to look through Instagram Carousel tiles, then take a screenshot of the right car and submit it for a chance to win prizes including a 10-day trip to Miami, New York or San Francisco. The tiles form a detailed city map with animated and live-action content. The scavenger hunt runs for three weeks through the first week of October.

• The game is designed to be followed as a storyline or to jump in at any time to search for clues on how to find a hidden Tiguan. Contestants can also get help from live people who will answer questions about the hunt.

Insight:

Volkswagen’s game on Instagram is an inventive way to engage the app’s users on the photo-sharing platform while giving them more information about the car and shows how the platform continues to attract big brands. Developed by ad agency Deutsch, the game has a lot of content that can be viewed even after the scavenger hunt finishes its run next month.

The campaign is a good example of how brands are starting to gamifying their digital campaigns as a way to engage mobile users. 

The campaign also shows much Instagram has evolved as an ad medium with the introduction of its Carousel Tiles that lets marketers string together multiple images and videos into one post. Five years ago, Ford launched an Instagram campaign for its Fiesta model of cars that urged users to submit photos on the platform and to tag them with “#Fiestagram” and another hashtag that was updated each week, Mashable reported. Ford saw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the campaign hub on Facebook each week. Now that Instagram has millions of more users, Volkswagen’s campaign should reach an even broader U.S. audience.

Instagram continues to expands its advertising options, focusing in part on Stories, which has gained users. Last week, Instagram Stories added the popular full-screen Canvas format, the ability for brands to purpose organic Stories as ads and broadcast Stories to a broader audience. The platform is also aggressively courting brands, cutting special deals in some cases so that marketers pick it over competitors like Snapchat.