Lexus Instagram Hijack

Car owners Instagram stories can look very similar. Cars, selfies in cars and some more cars. Boring! At the same time, Lexus as a brand is constantly looking for new ways of connecting to millennial an Gen Z audience.

We created a Giphy sticker pack, where half of the stickers had visible Lexus branding and the other half of the stickers had tens of small logos inside. The first half was tagged with Lexus related key-words. The other half was tagged with key-words which were related to Lexus main competitors – BMW, Mercedes, Audi. So when other car brands owners searched for some gif-content for stories from their brands our slightly branded stickers were the first ones to appear in search results.

The branding was so unobtrusive that even if noticed, those stickers were still used to create content for Instagram stories and were deliberately exposed to their followers.

38,6 million views in the first month, with 100% of them being earned organically. The objective exceeded by 860%. $0 media investment = $2.2 million in media earned