There's only one thing harder than shooting in Mumbai. Riding a bike in Mumbai.
Every year, 6.5 million cyclists decide to buy a new car. That’s why ŠKODA created We Love Cycling, an engagement platform for cyclists and potential car buyers.
Sharing the city streets among bikes and cars is one of its core topics. After showcasing the best practices of Sevilla and Copenhagen, it was time to check the darker side of bike-friendly urban planning.
No time to read further? Watch the full case study here.
Welcome to Mumbai, a city with the heaviest traffic in the world and virtually no cycling infrastructure. But also home to 200.000 bike messengers called dabbawalas, who deliver homemade lunches around the city every day.
To see how Mumbai compares to Europe, we asked three of the best bike messengers in the world to become dabbawalas for a day and deliver 6 lunches across 6 kilometers of rush hour Mumbai traffic - so the real dabbawala could for once enjoy a comfy ride in the ŠKODA YETI.
Meet the riders:
- Austin Horse. Multiple world champion, considered the best bike messenger in the world. Red Bull ambassador.
- Allan Shaw. 5th at North American championships 2016, representing UK as a key ŠKODA market.
- Cécile Bloch. Female world bike messenger champion 2016. From France, a core ŠKODA cycling market.
How did the messengers cope?
Watch the hero movie of the campaign:
During a three-day shoot in the streets of Mumbai, we managed to cover the actual race, create interviews with Austin Horse, Allan Shaw and Cécile Bloch and covered part of the race track in a 360° video, so the fans could experience the Mumbai streets on their own.
The films were followed by 18 original articles on We Love Cycling, covering the topic of urban cycling and infrastructure from an editorial point of view. People could also listen to the messenger's Mumbai playlists on Spotify.
Campaign performance:
- shortly after publishing, the hero video became the most engaging piece of cycling content online (Socialbakers),
- 2 million views of the hero video on We Love Cycling's social channels alone,
- 6.5 million impressions of all campaign assets,
- 0.01 € cost per view (thanks to high organic performance of the video),
- the campaign was awarded gold in the "Branded content" category on Czech ADC Awards 2017.
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Agency & production: Mustard
Client: ŠKODA
Creative director: Martin Svetlík
Direction: Giulio de Blasio
DOP: Jan J. Filip
Editor-in-chief: Jan Kořán
