1.7 Million Views in 14 Days: What Happens When Content and One of The Biggest Automotive Events Align.

The brief

Totem Automobili came to BC Media Essex with one Instagram account and a familiar problem for automotive brands: plenty of followers, not much momentum. We honed in on finding the niches parts of what makes their brand perform on social media which was, the music, the cars, and the locations.

The approach

Rather than treating content and engagement as two separate workstreams run by two separate teams, we built one strategy that did both jobs at once. We created content from the shows they attended and also shot the cars in an iconic location based around Monterrey Car Week - Big Sur. Capturing close ups of the many details they added to each car from herringbone carbon fibre weave in the door cards to custom stitching in the gaps between cushions on the seats, we found the thing people want to see most is what makes the specific car different to another car of the same model. Individual specifications is what the viewer wants to see, the engine what they want to hear and the location they recognise.

We tapped into followers interactions by making one of the three things that make a post stand out, the music, the location, or the car. So whether it's an iconic song from the 80/90s or its the hills of Big Sur one of the three needed to stand out more than anything. Having access to the location for free really helped as it meant we could use as many takes as we liked to get the perfect shot that captures one of the big three I previously mentioned.

The results

• 1.7 million views across the account in 14 days
• 6818 followers gained
• 997k accounts reached

The bigger result wasn't the view count on its own — it was what that view count represented: The start of a content rhythm the client has kept running ever since.

Why it worked

Automotive audiences don't follow a brand the way they follow a general lifestyle account - they follow it because owning the car (or wanting to) is part of who they are. Content that only sells misses that. Content built around the community around the car - the meets, the drives, the culture - gives people a reason to actually stop and watch, not just scroll past. That's the strategy behind every client we manage at BC Media Essex, and it's what produced this result in 14 days rather than 14 months.