Dodge: Durango x Ron Burgundy (“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues”)

To boost the new 2014 Dodge Durango, we teamed up with Dodge, Paramount Pictures and Funny or Die for a co-branded marketing collaboration that featured legendary news anchor Ron Burgundy (aka Will Ferrell in one of his signature roles) ahead of the holiday release of the film Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.

The campaign spanned television--70 spots in total--as well as print, digital and social media. And it marked the first time a movie studio and brand cross-promotion utilized marquee talent, in character, in original long and short form content.

For an encore performance, we recreated the ultimate online endurance event. In 1995, 24 Texans competed in a contest, “Hands on a Hardbody,” which awarded a car to the individual who could keep their hand on the car the longest. Naturally, we created the modern day online version, called “Hands on Ron Burgundy.” The rules: Whoever touched Ron’s hard body the longest, would win a brand new Dodge 2014 Durango. After 41 hours, a winner was crowned and nearly one million people spent the equivalent of 2.4 years touching Ron.

The campaign concluded with YouTube viewers spending the equivalent of 31.2 years watching our content. We garnered attention from SNL, GQ, Hypebeast, WSJ, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and many more, for a total of half a billion earned media impressions.

Most importantly, people were buying the Durango. Sales of the SUV increased 59%, an 11% jump overall for Chrysler, in the month following the launch of the campaign. Purchase intent rose 54% in the weeks after the campaign launched, according to Edmunds.com.