IWC Schaffhausen (UK)

Winning the race for Gen Z’s attention

Challenge

As an international brand of luxury, IWC is popular among mature audiences in the UK – but is relatively unknown among the Gen Z community. The 10 Group was challenged to create newsworthy content that would reinforce the link between Formula One racing, where IWC is an official sponsor of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team, and its brand messaging.

Results

252

Gamers took part in the Fastest Lap Challenge

800

Event registrations

51k

Views of the Twitch livestream

840k+

Video views

933k+

Social reach

approach

To engage our target audience of Gen-Z gamers, we invited them to virtually join the team of either George Russell or Jarno Opmeer for the chance to attend an IWC event, streamed live on Twitch in London.

Gamers would sign up on the website, where they would receive a promotional code to use on iRacing (an online racing platform) to complete a fastest lap challenge. The challenge took place over two weeks, and the users with the four fastest times won a place at our exclusive event. At the event, finalists will race against each other – with the winner receiving an IWC watch. We built a strong relationship with online racing platform iRacing and worked closely with them to engage our target audience.

To drive awareness of the event, we created content featuring George and Jarno racing at Brackley, the home of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, in a number of different formats – from campaign videos and stills to top-tips animations and bespoke assets for social media. We built a website to host all the content and event details, mapped out a detailed user journey and created a user guide for gamers. We managed the media buy for Twitch to host our campaign video, which  encouraged users to click through to the website to join our team. So far, the video has delivered over 287k impressions, with 93% of users viewing the video fully.

We set up a multi-channel distribution strategy. For social media, we put together content for IWC Global, IWC UK, MAP and iRacing to post, and partnered with influencers and MAP ambassadors George Russell and Jarno Opmeer. These individuals helped drive visibility for the campaign and encouraged widespread participation. We saw huge spikes in traffic to our website whenever we posted on social media, which is testament to the power of the high-energy, distinctive content we produced to drive click-throughs.

We facilitated top-tier branded media interviews with George and Jarno in Brackley, including with iNews, Reuters, Autosport UK and PC Gamer. We created a suite of media assets for our target media, including quotes, a press release, stills and video content.

We also commissioned new consumer research into the rise of e-sports in the UK, the results of which enabled us to create a newsworthy story to secure another burst of earned coverage in between the launch and the live event.

Building on the success of this first stage of the campaign, IWC and The 10 Group produced the IWC iRacing Esports Sim Challenge event. Hosted by Harry Pinero and Lionheart, the event featured in-person appearances by Jarno Opmeer and pre-recorded video messages from George Russell. The build-up, races and prize-giving ceremony were live streamed onto popular gaming platform Twitch by The 10 Group and mixed using on-site cameras and in-game footage. An enormous 42,000 people watched the live stream as it happened, and a further 9,000 people have watched it since.