When Michelin launched the new 80/20 Anakee Adventure motorcycle tire they wanted to show up differently—in a way that felt new, yet authentic to Michelin. To do this, SixSpeed took these tires to the desert, produced a three-day event, created a brand experience worth talking about and delivered it to riders who double as storytellers.
7-time AMA Champion
UpShift Online
GS Racing Athlete
We needed a small event to have a large reach—so the people we invited had to be the publishers. We identified and invited a mix of influential rider publishers with a combined broad reach across the adventure rider community. Intrinsically motivated to attend and share, these people made this event epic, and made sure our message was reaching our niche rider audience looking for tires built to live up to their expectations. Other Riders: Jesse Ziegler, Randy Commans, Lance Gines, Dimitiri Tournas, Corey Eastman, Kyle Bradshaw, Steve Kamrad RevZilla, Kevin Wing
To find a location, we asked a few questions: how long does our audience ride? What do they bring with them? What other brands do they interact with? Looking to motorcycle blogs, rider reviews and our own motorcycle enthusiasts we needed to find what trails were best in the spring. We knew we needed 80% paved paths with 20% off road and landscapes worthy of professional photography. Death Valley offered everything.
For an invite, we provided our participants with a kit they could use: A Nelson Rigg waterproof riding pack, a multitool designed for the motorcycle adventurer, a handful of camping necessities, and a countdown timer that ticked down the seconds until the Anakee Adventure. And on the back of the map we printed a vintage Bibendum (aka The Michelin Man) motorcycle poster, perfect for garage walls.
When our 15 invitees got to Death Valley, they found a camp set up—and cold temperatures (even our Minnesotan team thought so). They slept under the stars and woke up to postcard-worthy scenery, breakfast and a product-technical debrief from the Michelin 2Wheel team about the tires. The riders and our capture team, led by Drew Martin, headed out to test the tires on iconic Death Valley road routes linked to some pretty gnarly rocky mountain passes. They ended up on the dry lake beds for a sunset drift and wheelie hero session all caught on camera to show off the tires and celebrate our rider’s skills.
We provided our riders with valuable information to make publishing easier—because when publishing is easier, it happens more often, with higher quality. After a long day of riding, attendees came back to camp for dinner while the SixSpeed team edited the photos taken throughout the day. Final images were organized and delivered via link to each rider, so by dusk, each person had access to professionally captured assets to post to their social channels while memories were fresh and the stoke was still high.
Together, we created an experience that gained attention and reach before, during and after the event. We showed up with a distinct vision and turned a small event into bigtime buzz. The experience motivated our invitees to share on social channels and publish multiple articles. Our team of 15 turned into well over a million impressions.
With the Anakee Adventure we were able to blur the lines between host and rider, dirt and road, event and capture. We didn’t limit ourselves to a strict shot list and left room for serendipitous creativity. Because that’s where the magic happens and that’s how brands stand out, differently.
The Anakee event was to designed to generate buzz for the Anakee Adventure tire. And, boy, did it deliver with social chatter beginning the moment the event was announced in early February, peaking during the mid-March event date and still going strong months after it was all over. In fact, rider images, product reviews and published stories from Death Valley continue to generate more earned reach daily.
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