by Katie Meyer

How can your brand stand out online? When a brand chooses to do something different, it takes a risk. But as we’ve said before: no guts, no glory. Or in Audi’s case, no guts, no social media disaster.

On Facebook and Instagram, Audi shares photos of beautiful cars, often blurred slightly to indicate how quickly they’re cutting through their stunning backdrops. With Crowdbabble’s content browsing tool, we pinpointed pre-crisis posts. They all look a bit like this:

For Audi’s Facebook account, it was all cars all the time. With the exception of spring 2014, when Audi decided to do something different.

Failing the Driver’s Test

Instead of highlighting the cars, why not highlight the drivers? We want our users to become drivers, don’t we? If we can get them to aspire to own a car, maybe we can get them to aspire to be a certain type of driver: urban, affluent, creative. Drivers who earned the privilege of driving an Audi.

The train of thought of Audi’s marketing team leading up to the social media fail might have gone along those lines — the plan seems logical and innovative at best, and at worst, quite harmless. Sharing photos of drivers instead of cars with the hashtag #PaidMyDues, however, was a bigger shock to users than the brand anticipated.

As it turns out, users who enjoyed liking pictures of hot cars in beautiful settings found detailed stories about seemingly imaginary drivers pointless, for a few reasons. Users reacted to vent that the #PaidMyDues campaign was a troubling indication that Audi was straying from its purpose: making great cars.

Rather than acting as ideal drivers that Facebook and Twitter fans would aspire to, the drivers of the #PaidMyDues campaign played the role of crash test dummies in a failed prototype. They were smashed to pieces. As Audi Facebook fan Hironori posted, “What is this? Don’t care about stories. Car info please.”

A False Start

Using Crowdbabble’s daily engagement tool, we were able to zero in on the day the campaign went live on Facebook and read all user comments. Before the campaign, any user could imagine themselves in the drivers seat. #PaidMyDues took that away. As a result, engagement was lower than normal during the campaign in late April and early May 2014.