Škoda produced the world’s first car designed by members of a subreddit after discovering fans of its Octavia model on r/CarTalkUK.
The brand identified every customisable component of the Octavia and created a Reddit thread, in which users could upvote or downvote different trim options.
After the most popular options had been chosen, Škoda created an ad to notify its fans that it had created an Octavia based on their suggestions. It also added the design to its website, listing that version of the car as ‘the Redditor edition’.
Škoda then invited members of the r/CarTalkUK community to test drive the Redditor edition, and broadcast the drivers’ reviews.
‘We didn’t ask people for reviews but they volunteered reviews,’ PHD UK’s client partner, Tom Sheppey, said. ‘We took those quotes and we made them the backbone of the above-the-line comms.’
‘We had a 44% uplift in website visits, but more importantly, we exceeded our order target by 255%, so two and a half times as many as we expected to get,’ Škoda’s brand marketing director, Rhidian Taylor, said.
He added that, while the brand typically spends about £3-5 million on media for a car launch, the Reddit campaign cost only £500,000.
Škoda’s Taylor and PHD’s Sheppey gave a behind-the-scenes account of creating the Redditor Edit campaign at MediaCat Live in London, on 17 September.
They admitted that the brand’s earlier efforts to appeal to Redditors had fallen flat. In the spring of 2024, it had targeted family-based subreddits, inviting members to say what ‘familying’ — a word invented by Škoda to promote its spacious SUVs — meant to them, and its posts were met with responses like ‘this is a bad advert and you should feel bad’, and ‘f**k off’.
While conducting research on consumer attitudes towards the Octavia, however, they came across the r/CarTalkUK subreddit, which had more than 400,000 members and was littered with ecstatic praise for the car, including references to it as ‘our Lord and Saviour’.
‘It was an opportunity to do something a little different and collaborate with our superfans,’ said Sheppey.
Handing over control to fans presented risks, but Škoda and PHD decided it was worth it, if it meant an opportunity to be authentic and distinctive in a way that is rare within the well-established automotive category.
To harness the community, PHD devised a strategy with two pillars. First, it would ‘fan the flames’ to see if they could turn superfans into advocates for the brand, and then it would ‘spread the love’, using Škoda’s media-buying clout to amplify that advocacy.
Initially, the idea was just to invite car fans — rather than motoring journalists — to be the first to test drive its new Octavia as part of what it called ‘the Reddit Car Share’. Reddit doesn’t allow brands to target specific subreddits, according to Taylor, but Škoda was able to reference r/CarTalkUK in the ads targeting car enthusiasts in general.
The test drive generated so much buzz within the Reddit community that users began asking for more, and one Redditor commented that the brand should design a CarTalkUK trim of the Octavia model, which was the genesis of the Redditor Edit.
Reflecting on the campaign, Sheppey and Taylor shared five learnings for better engaging fan communities.
First, they recommend finding ‘your faithful few’ (ie, the equivalent of r/CarTalkUK for Škoda). They then advise to ‘always do as you say’, ‘make your message personal’, and ‘to let go of control’. Their final advice for engaging with superfans is to have a ‘thick skin’ since ‘Redditors wear their edginess as a badge of pride’.
