PURPLE ROADS — CHEVY

Purple Roads, which won a Clio and Best-Of-Show at “The D Show” (Detroit), was an integrated effort that tied together two separate events: The Super Bowl and, two days afterwards, World Cancer Day.

Beyond the proximity of these two dates, which in all honesty was just happenstance, the connection had to do with what we were trying to communicate about Chevy Silverado: trucks as strong as the men and women who drive them. Throughout the year, we had explored what it meant to be strong in modern America. Now for the Super Bowl, we wanted to push the boundaries.

The core idea behind Purple Roads was a celebration of families that have to fight cancer. That takes a special kind of strength.

The Super Bowl spot looked and felt like nothing else on the air that day. 

Below are some youtube comments. but there's a lot more.

The spot drove people to a microsite, purpleroads.com. Purple is the official color of cancer survival. For World Cancer Day, we asked people to help us celebrate survivors and their families by “purpling” their Facebook or Twitter profile. For everyone who did, Chevy would contribute a dollar to the American Cancer Society.

The results: over 1.5 million people purpled their Facebook profile within three days, propelling Chevrolet to #1 Facebook fan acquisition and #1 in social audience impact, ahead of both Coke and Microsoft, making this the most successful social media campaign in GM’s history. And spreading lots of purple everywhere.

ECD, Writer – Additional Credits: Jack Crifasi, Cameron McIntosh, Adam Simmons, Joe Kayser, Larry Donabedian, Jim Amicucci, Galen Chandler, Johnny Walker, Juan Castro, Amalie Brettschneider, Jack Douglas