Submitted by YKONEAgency IPI Score 84/100

BMW France x YKONE: Always On 2025

Influencer Marketing

A year-long, event-tied influencer program anchoring BMW France to five cultural moments across cinema, motorsport, music, and sailing, spotlighting new electric models.

8.1MReach
32.9MImpressions
550KInteractions

About the campaign

BMW France needed to sustain cultural relevance across a full calendar year and draw attention to its new electric models, the i7, iX, and iX3, without relying on a single campaign burst, and without landing as a generic sponsor at events that have nothing to do with cars.

YKONE structured Always On 2025 around five major French cultural moments, the Cannes Film Festival, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Le Mans Classic, Tomorrowland, and Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez, treating each as a discrete activation with its own creator selection and artistic direction so BMW's presence felt embedded rather than imported. The logic was that content native to a setting outperforms generic automotive promotion, so the 13 creators deployed across the year were matched individually to each event's cultural register, from prestige cinema to endurance motorsport, electronic music, and luxury sailing, publishing across Instagram and TikTok. The iX3 reveal was carved out as a standalone product-launch moment within the programme, amplified by high-profile French creators including Lena Mahfouf, Seb la Frite, and Inoxtag.

YKONE, which handled casting, artistic direction, campaign management, and on-site production, reports 260 posts generating 3.6 million reach, 19.1 million impressions, 276,100 interactions, and a 7.6 percent engagement rate, figures the agency characterises as above typical automotive benchmarks, though all are self-reported.

Case in 60 seconds

BMW France needed to sustain cultural relevance across a full calendar year and draw attention to new electric models, including the i7, iX, and iX3, without relying on a single campaign burst.

Five major French cultural events, spanning cinema, endurance motorsport, electronic music, and luxury sailing, each carry distinct audience expectations and aesthetic codes; content that feels native to a setting outperforms generic automotive promotion.

Structure a year-long always-on program that treats each of the five events as a discrete activation with its own creator selection and artistic direction, so BMW's presence feels embedded rather than imported.

YKONE handled influencer casting, artistic direction, campaign management, and on-site production across the Cannes Film Festival, 24H Le Mans, Le Mans Classic, Tomorrowland, and Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez, deploying a roster of creators whose profiles matched each event's cultural register. The iX3 reveal was treated as a distinct product-launch moment within the program, with high-profile French creators including Lena Mahfouf, Seb la Frite, and Inoxtag brought in to amplify the launch.

The program generated a reported 8.1 million reach, 32.9 million impressions and 550,000 interactions across 260 posts. All figures are self-reported by YKONE and have not been independently verified.

Strategy Breakdown

The primary strategy-learning section — interpretation, not a press-release summary.

The program addressed five distinct audiences determined by event context: prestige film industry and celebrity watchers at Cannes, endurance motorsport fans at 24H Le Mans and Le Mans Classic, electronic music festival-goers at Tomorrowland, and luxury lifestyle consumers at Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez, according to YKONE's portfolio description.
Automotive brands risk appearing as generic sponsors when they enter cultural events that have nothing to do with cars. BMW needed to appear genuinely relevant to audiences whose primary passion, cinema, racing heritage, electronic music, or sailing, is not the product category.
Electric vehicle marketing faces the additional challenge of shifting brand perception without abandoning the performance and prestige codes that existing BMW audiences value. Spotlighting the i7, iX, and iX3 across culturally diverse settings required maintaining those codes while signalling modernity.
Based on the available evidence, BMW was positioned as a cultural participant rather than a conventional advertiser, with each event providing a different context in which the brand's values could be expressed through creators who already belonged to that world, as described by YKONE.
Audiences are more receptive to brand content when it is delivered by creators they already follow for reasons unrelated to the brand. Matching creator selection to the specific cultural register of each event, rather than deploying a fixed roster, aimed to reduce the perceived distance between the BMW message and the creator's established credibility in that context, per YKONE.

Creative & Execution System

Assets & channels

  • Instagram posts and stories
  • TikTok videos
  • On-site event content captured and published across 260 posts in total

Partners

  • YKONE (influencer casting, artistic direction, campaign management, on-site production)

Participation mechanic

  • Event attendance and creator-led content production at each of the five cultural events
  • Product placement and feature of BMW electric models (i7, iX, iX3) within creator content
  • iX3 launch amplification via high-profile French creator cohort including Lena Mahfouf, Seb la Frite, and Inoxtag

Creator role

  • Creators matched individually to each event's cultural register
  • Creators served as primary content producers and audience proxies for each distinct cultural setting
  • High-profile creators deployed specifically for the iX3 reveal as a distinct product-launch unit

Results & Evidence

MetricValueResult typeConfidence
Reach8.1 millionReachAgency reported
Impressions32.9 millionImpressionsAgency reported
Interactions550,000EngagementAgency reported

Why YKONE's strategy worked

  1. 1

    Matching creator selection to the specific cultural register of each event, rather than deploying a uniform roster, appears to have sustained engagement across five settings with very different audiences and aesthetic codes, per YKONE's own account.

  2. 2

    An always-on structure can accommodate a discrete product-launch moment — in this case the iX3 reveal — without disrupting the broader brand-building program, provided the launch unit is treated as its own activation with appropriate creator selection, as described by YKONE.

  3. 3

    Sustained year-long programming across five events produced a volume of content (260 posts) and a breadth of cultural association that would be difficult to achieve through short-term campaign bursts, based on the reported figures.

  4. 4

    Concentrating high-profile creator talent on the iX3 reveal suggests a tiered creator strategy where well-known names are reserved for priority product moments while the broader roster handles ambient brand presence.

  5. 5

    Covering cinema, endurance motorsport, electronic music, and luxury sailing in a single annual program gave BMW cumulative cultural coverage without requiring one creative concept to stretch across incompatible contexts, per YKONE.

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