Swedish agency Prime scooped five accolades at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival last week, winning the highest number of PR awards for any comms agency this year.

Both Carwinism for Audi Sweden (which was given a gold in the automotive and transportation category), and Save Christmas for Kraft Foods’ Aladdin (which achieved the same but in the best use of social media category) rely heavily on digital comms, with online activity central to each campaign’s strategy.

For Audi, the goal was celebrate the brand’s 100 year anniversary while highlighting the company’s history of tech innovation to its target market and reaching five million or more in process (it’s worth keeping in mind here that the country itself has a population of just nine million).

The main hurdle was that most of the brand’s target audience within Sweden don’t actually read publications that cover cars specifically. To introduce an editorial undercurrent that would appeal to a broader selection of press, Prime combined Audi and Darwin’s anniversaries together (coinciding with the worst motoring industry crisis in history) to introduce a new evolution theory called Carwinism.

On Darwin’s birthday, Audi launched Carwinism.se, which saw prominent thought-leaders – from a Nobel Prize judge in the field of physics to a hip hop columnist – explain the evolution of the car from their own perspective. The factors that influence the evolution of car design are infinite, and therefore so is the potential for producing different media pitches. For example, while the parallel evolution of cars and home appliances caught the eye of design media, the story of how music production evolved according to which type of music you listened to while driving was popular with the music press. Reversing the logic of many campaign sites, instead of driving traffic to the site, Prime maximised traffic, publicity and involvement outside it by using the site as a hub for other people’s content. This editorial approach made it possible to tap into the daily news flow, cherry-picking current events that were relevant to the project.

Sweden’s national news agency reported on the campaign no less than five times, with coverage ranging from Elle Magazine, philosophy blogs, science communities and even the world’s biggest SAAB fansite. In fact, over 70 articles about the site (40% of which were external to motor media) were written, reaching 15 million people and resulting in a cost-per-contact of just €0.01.

Tomorrow we’ll be looking at Prime’s Kraft Foods case study, and how a Facebook-hosted competition helped the brand to reach over 33 million people.