Enjoying a car show during Covid shutdown
Website: OceansideAutoAppraisers.com
Business: Specialty Auto Appraiser
Purpose: a unique web page to promote, instruct, and display a virtual car show allowing specialty car owners to meet virtually during the Covid shutdown and show off their cars.
My long-time best friend David in British Columbia, Canada, runs his own specialty auto appraisal business. Recently, we re-did his entire website to tune it for search engine optimization, make it faster loading, and add new services such as online booking and servicing of appraisals.
As the world shut down due to Covid, he came up with a new idea.
Many of David’s clients enjoy taking their restored cars to meet friends and other car folk at the many auto shows held by local and provincial/state clubs around North America. These are grass-roots shows put on by local people and hosted by their regional and local car clubs.
Unfortunately with the Covid-19 pandemic, there haven’t been any this year — they’ve all been cancelled. No car shows equals some very bored car guys.
But, if you know a car guy like David, you’ll also know that wouldn’t stop him…
He decided to host a virtual car show using his website at OceansideAutoAppraisers.com.
How did it work?
David used email and word-of-mouth to spread an appeal to car owners for 1-to-2 minute videos of their cars and themselves giving viewers a tour. They used a free file-transfer service called WeTransfer to send in the video files.
DerekCadzow.com created the branded video title and trailer and simply added them to the front and back of those videos that car owners edited themselves. When other car owners just sent David the raw video — we had fun editing those from scratch, adding the title and trailer, and writing the words on the video gallery page. We used Final Cut Pro for the video and audio editing and WordPress for the website. We created David’s new YouTube account and hosted all the videos from there.
We designed a specialized and centralized page on OceansideAutoAppraisers.com to present all the wonderful video contributions, allowing car owners to see their own videos alongside everyone else’s — an online car show almost as good as being there. (The car show page was taken down at the end of the car show, so is not viewable — but here’s some screen shots to show you what it was like.)
At first, David didn’t know how many people would participate — but, as videos continued to roll in we had to redesign the page three times to accommodate and display all the proud owners and their vintage and exotic automobiles.
David also gave a boost to some local auto-related businesses, car clubs, and specialty collectors with featured videos throughout the page.
He worked with Hagerty specialty auto insurance to stage the car show. In the spirit of the virtual event, Hagerty contributed a few of their own videos too, which were featured prominently throughout the page as the co-sponsor with Oceanside Auto Appraisers.
Results
In the end, almost 100 specialty cars can be seen on the car show page between individual contributors, collectors, clubs, and business. I think David was blown away with the reaction.
He also enjoyed a surge in visitors to his site increasing traffic by around 900 percent over the 30 days before the car show and received a number of complementary emails from enthusiastic participants and viewers.
We even got involved in this show ourselves, entering a short video about our 2000 Mazda Miata. This was typical of the videos people submitted and will let you see what they were like (although my on-camera presentation skills need a bit of work!)
DerekCadzow.com creates imaginative, engaging websites for select clients. This series highlights some of those sites and tells you the story behind each of them. Got a project in mind? Please let us know about it from the contact page.
