Take a test drive without leaving your laptop.
The new Holden Cruze: you really can tell it where to go
THE PROBLEM:
Mention Holden to almost any kiwi, and you’ll get a lot of love back. Most of it, though, will be all V8s and vinyl seats – we just don’t think of them as an innovative brand, and that’s a bit of a problem when you’ve got a highly innovative new Holden to sell.
THE THINKING:
The new Holden Cruze is packed with an incredible range of bells and whistles as standard. From keyless entry to MyLink voice-activated satnav, it’s innovation that really has to be experienced. So we did just that.
THE IDEA:
Demonstrate the innovation by inviting people to take a road trip, using their voice… right then and there, in a voice activated web ad.
THE EXECUTION:
Tell Cruze – yes, out loud – which classic kiwi location you’d like to visit, and which music you’d prefer. Using Google’s new voice recognition API, the banner recognises your requests, calls in a stitched-together point-of-view hyperlapse film using streetview data, overlays the music track of your choice, and takes you on an iconic kiwi roadtrip. It’s an extraordinary, innovative interaction – one that ends with an invitation to experience the new Holden for real.
We created an online test drive of the technology, in the form of a highly interactive web ad that invited you to speak the name of a destination — and be taken on a virtual test-drive to that place, without leaving your laptop.
Innovation, engineering — and safety.
Just like the new Cruze, this experience featured a ton of engineering under the hood, a slick interface, and some powerful safety features:
We leveraged the beta version of the HTML5 Google Voice SDK — tuned to the Kiwi accent and unique placenames
We built a web scraper that captured street view sequences of your journey in the background as PNGs, and stitched them into a hyperlapse video, on the fly
And we built ten different safety fallback versions for browser and OS compatibility — can’t have a car technology demo causing your laptop to crash, now, can we?!
And of course, we invited users to experience the tech for real, by adding a book-a-test-drive form field to the unit..
