Hasta La Creative!

In the ad-blocking era, marketers are going to great lengths to get their brands in front of skeptical consumers. For Volkswagen, that means sending people on a scavenger hunt through an imaginary city on Instagram that is devoid of paid advertising.

The social media sweepstakes is part of a new campaign for the redesigned 2018 Tiguan crossover that began last month with a TV ad called “The New King.” The spot, by Deutsch L.A., shows an inflatable King Kong chasing down a woman driving a red Tiguan through the city. The vehicle, not the gorilla, is the new “king of the concrete jungle,” declares the spot. The campaign pitches the Tiguan to urban single people, an increasingly important audience for marketers of SUVs and crossovers.

VW on Friday made the TV ad come to life on Instagram via a 21-day scavenger hunt in which viewers are fed daily clues and asked to find hidden Tiguans in a cityscape spread across multiple tiles. There is a catch, of course: To enter a sweepstakes for daily prizes, viewers must take a screenshot of the Tiguan and send a direct message to a VW-run account. The grand prize is a 10-day trip to San Francisco, Miami and New York. This video shows how it works:

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