The blink of an eye

Capturing and conveying the essence of performance to an audience has long been a challenge to creative agencies. Horsepower figures, 0 to 100km/h times and top speed are all just so many numbers on a page or a screen. How then to demonstrate the performance of a car like the Audi R8 V10 plus – and its 449kW of power – and not fall foul of strict advertising guidelines?

Digital design company, Holler, has managed just such a brief, sharing the experience of the R8’s power and performance with viewers through the R8 Blink campaign. So successful is the experience that the microsite was shortlisted at the recent 2017 Cannes Lions, the ‘Academy Awards’ of the creative world.

Like so many clever concepts, the idea is disarmingly simple. Just how far does the Audi R8 travel in the blink of an eye? With R8 Blink, the viewer experiences the incredible acceleration and speed of the R8 measured in this completely new way. The ‘creative interactive experience’ allows viewers to ‘feel the speed’  by turning the human blink into a personal unit of velocity.

Viewers watching online had their blinks tracked by webcam to create a personal experience for each viewer. The resulting footage shows the distance travelled with each blink, or rather, didn’t show the distance travelled with each blink.

Raced down an airstrip by a professional driver, the R8 covers one kilometre over the course of the run, with the average viewer blinking eight times and ‘missing’ as much as 130 metres of the car’s progress. That’s 37 metres per blink.

The effective is powerful and captivating. Although the race is just one minute long, viewers spent more than eight minutes interacting with the site – an extraordinary performance, and the message delivered loud and clear.

Seeing, or in this case, not seeing, is believing.