How a sassy girl called Cemora sold a sexy car called Racemo...

Last week TaMo - Tata Motors' sub-brand, launched Racemo - a two-seater, fully connected, sports coupe at the 87th Geneva International Motor Show.

Meanwhile, in the digital space, Jack in the Box Worldwide, in collaboration with TaMo, launched what the agency calls a 'guerrilla activity' to build intrigue and hype around the launch.

"Our brief was to create tremendous hype and a fan following for the car prior to its launch. However, we couldn't reveal the name of the car, show it, talk about the brand, or even reveal the fact that it was a car. A challenging brief like that deserved an out of the box response. That response was Cemora - a girl who took social media by storm," he says.

But the challenges for the agency were not getting over with just this much. Given that Cemora was just a name, a personality or a voice with no face, it was not easy to give her a personal touch and get users to relate to or engage with her.

"Even if she were a girl, how can anyone just debut on the internet one day and expect to become popular?" quips Pardiwalla, adding that to make this happen, the agency created a backstory for Cemora which was about her India travels. The brand also got leading Indian fashion photographer, Daboo Ratnani to kickstart the campaign. Later, other celebs were also roped in.

Cemora claims to have gained 12,500 followers on Instagram and Twitter, a reach of 12.1 million and (cumulative) 1.7 million likes, shares, comments and video views, almost all of it being organic.

The subtle spin to the campaign was that everything was shot from the perspective of the car and hints were given to followers all along, whether it was the pictures taken from a height of 3-3.5 feet (the height of the car), the beeping horn, screeching brakes or the tuning of the car radio.

This campaign is Tata Motors' first association with Jack in the Box Worldwide - an integrated communications company with digital at its core, which was founded in 2009. It is part of The 120 Media Collective, other subsidiary brands under which include Bang Bang Films (a commercials production company) and Sniper (commercials and content production).

However, this is not the first time Tata Motors went all out to woo the digital audience. Recall that for the launch of its hatchback, Tiago, the brand came up with a web-series in partnership with TVF and launched a virtual reality campaign with brand ambassador Lionel Messi.

Instagram, on the other hand, also seems to have become a hot favourite amongst brands of late, thanks to its visually interactive nature. Some of the recent examples of such campaigns include Flipkart's trend chain, Tata Cliq's #WhateverCLiQsForYou and Samsung's campaign for Gear S2.

Intrigued...

"Men have a special place for their car. They tend to romanticise it, the way they'd think about their girlfriends/ wives. So, personifying the brand built on this insight beautifully. Much of the excitement soared thanks to this innate attitude towards cars, especially sports cars, which was leveraged successfully." adds Khan.