We uncovered the insight of THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF PLAYFULNESS for the campaign. People were hungry to find and maintain optimism and joy everywhere they could. This sentiment was recently echoed by Adobe Stock’s 2022 Creative Trends forecast listing “Powerfully Playful” as one of their ground-breaking predictions for the post-lockdown life.

“There is a primal need for play.” For weary consumers across all sectors, this trend focuses on a sense of laughter, enthusiasm, and hope. After years of “thumbism” and mindlessly scrolling through social media content, consumers grew weary and want something different. They want to play and to feel. Joyful, unabashed freedom was put on hold during the pandemic and people were looking to reignite their playful side. If we want to uplift and bring colors and hopefulness to our Vietnamese people, we will make colors shine and sing beautiful songs of hope, joy, passion, and most importantly, youth. It is what Vespa stands for. To bring this to life, we held a UGC Creative contest where we invited and empowered people to join in our celebration, where all forms of visual formats were encouraged as responses to the question “What are the colors of youth in you?”. The contest was activated through key passion points & communities of Travel, Fashion, Art, which are highly relevant to the target audience and smartly linked with our color range of Vespa.

We created the whole social media campaign and content development around the idea of how COLORGASM brings emotions and playfulness to the audience. The creative idea was “Live boundlessly with your color of youth”. The truth is, we feel young when we do the things we love. Youth, is therefore, not a number, but it’s when we feel the full spectrum of our COLORGASM and we show our youthful colors, be it innocence, foolishness, passion, spontaneity, or fun. The campaign celebrated YOUTH in all its shades and colors, encouraging our consumers to live their life with boundless inspiration and playfulness.
We created a creative playbook with a variety of assets that were optimised for social use and adaptive to the nature of each channel in the ecosystem.
- Official launch the campaign & excite consumers with a series of 5 KVs - a visual feast of refreshing colors that bring out the diverse personalities of each of our hero colors;
- Excite consumers & bring them deeper into our Vespa colors world with 6 ANIMATED SERIES - Hard-to-miss social storytelling of colors that pop out of every screen;
- Engage & educate the consumers about our sexy offerings through 5 CAROUSELS - Product-shots from multiple angles to drive test rides;
- Continuously remind the consumers about our offerings through 5 SINGLE PRODUCT PHOTOS - Color-led shots to emphasise hero colors of the campaign;
- Create a unique & memorable visual identity through 5 BACKGROUND PATTERNS - Pattern-featured background to support printing materials.
We then followed with a UGC creative contest with the theme: Together with your Vespa, let’s answer: "What are the colors of youth in you?". This contest was a testament to how we stayed authentic and fostered deeper connection with our target, so that true co-creation could take place.
What does it mean to be young? Is it beauty or stamina? Appearance, health or age? We are taught to define youth by these concepts. But is it fair to attach youth to a number? While in fact, feeling “young" is feeling the passion and enthusiasm flaring up in our hearts every time we get to do what we love, regardless of how old we are. It is the excitement before every journey, the openness to new experiences and new love. Youth is not a number. Youth is when you feel and show your youthful colors.

With your Vespa, explore the outstanding color range of #VespaColorsofYouth under a new and unique perspective, staying true to the spirit that Vespa has always pursued: free, creative, forever young and full of emotions.
There are 2 ways of engagement in the UGC contest:
1. Contestants can play mix-and-match with Vespa new color template with their own pictures/videos
2. By using the Vespa new color collection as the inspiration to freely express their colors of youth.
The contest went viral and easily spread out to all target audiences across 30 provinces throughout all provinces of Vietnam with North 44%, Central 17% and South 40%, especially Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Dong Nai topping the contributions despite being under heavy lockdown. By inheriting the classic and irreverent side of the Vespa culture, this contest did not cease to amaze by pushing the contestants to break the boundaries of style with Vespa. There is literally no limit to creativity!
Our contest deep dive formula to hit the right emotions with our target audience:
Innovative Visual Formats
Contest participants pulled out all the stops to delight everyone with their creativity: Quilling paper art, Animation videos, Animated illustrations, Graphics (3D fake),…
Proper Investments into Submissions
More than that, they also did not hesitate to put their all into the production. We received colorful submissions that were on par with magazine editorials – in-studio shootings and even wedding anniversary shootings… The numbers speak for themselves, among all submissions we received, we categorized:
+ 15% submissions in art territory
+ 25% in Fashion category
+ 60% submissions in travel category
Impressive Message Implementation
We got a glimpse into our audience’s hearts through their personal youth stories that were told in the most interesting, profound, and fresh way.

The digital channel mix was a combination of our owned channels and outreach channels.
Owned channels:
- We used Facebook as the main hub for our campaign, activating full funnel communications from awareness, to engagement, to running lead ads that drove conversion.
- Instagram served as the inspirational gallery to inspire and evoke brand love.
Outreach channels:
- We leveraged 5 passion point communities & 10 influencers to extend our audience and build emotional conversations amongst our audiences.
- Popular Vietnamese content platforms (Kenh14, Zing) and 15 journalists were recruited to further amplify our campaign’s reach and storytelling.
- We also recruited the contestants at local level by amplifying communication on Piaggio dealers social media

The UGC contest was activated on both owned channels and outreach communities with 3 passion points: Travel, Fashion and Art, deepening the connection between our brand with our consumers, influencers, and Vespa lovers.

Our campaign brought color and lift amidst the darkness and was the breath of much needed fresh air against the cold machinery and function of the category. We celebrated, we played, we were joyous, and we were free. And more importantly, we were not alone. Our emotional and colorful story gained a lot of attention and won the hearts of the Vietnamese people, uplifting their spirits in dark times. We were successful in mobilising a strong support from not only our Vespiti community but also people from all over the country, sustaining and increasing brand love.
(The campaign ran from May 24 2021 to July 25 2021)

1 122 401 Total Interactions (posts + likes + shares + comments)
286 625 Total Buzz (posts + comments + shares)
407.915 Total Engagement (Owned Channel & Vespa Lovers & Community)
94% Positive Sentiment
253 Contest Submissions
26.5% Facebook Engagement rate (including views) vs. 11% market norm
+300% Facebook Fanpage growth
372 Inbox Messages (+289%)
1680 Online Lead – 98.4%% KPI
645 Qualified Lead – 89.6% KPI
38.39% Qualified CR

Our success didn’t stop there. The campaign also played an important role in Vespa’s business performance:
+ 1665 scooters sell-out, contributing to Vespa’s total sell-out of 24 727 scooters in 2021 and helping it slowly recover from the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020 (28 090 scooters).
+ Our efforts especially paid off in driving awareness and sales of individual scooters and their new colors (Results from June to August 2021):
- Vespa Primavera: +270% (11% to 30%)
- Vespa Sprint: +50% (10% to 15%)
- Vespa GTS: +40% (18% to 25%)