Campaigns on the old bmw.com.

The launch of the BMW 740d with 3.9-litre V8 biturbo diesel engine and common rail direct injection was my first project for BMW as a copywriter in mid-1999. At that time there was a “BMW driver circle”: a closed forum for BMW 7 Series drivers and for this I wrote an article about this 245 hp V8 diesel. Not my last praise of a diesel in the following 15 years. Mea culpa.

After that came a lot of vehicle launches, lifecycle updates, relaunches, budget defences – a lot of small and big projects, of which I have summarized excerpts here. In retrospect, none of them was unique, but in each one there was something unique. And if it was the people who worked with me on these digital projects.

1 2 3 4 5 6

A funny bird called nostalgia.

Ok, looking nostalgically at digital works that have long since fallen victim to the Big Bit Eater is about the same as playing “The good comrade” on the trumpet next to the toilet bowl after every big deal. The microcosm of individual works is rarely exciting anyway.
Much more exciting is the mutation of working life into a digital journey through time: The first live teasers were celebrated at the end of the 90s with ecstatic launch parties. We made big eyes at the possibilities of Flash. Everyone wanted to get into Second Life, but there was more second than life in it. A platform called facebook went online, DAUs became influencers. Step by step, HTML5 blew our minds. Content is now called King. And if they didn’t die…

Automotive as drive.

With each new model, new skills were required and these were acquired with the production: storyboards, music selection, editing, file compression, the right codec, acceptable loading times, colour grading, using After Effects, embedding responsive interactions, creating cutdowns for social … I didn’t do everything myself, but I accompanied. I always liked the versatility of the work.

A chapter in itself: the configurator.

The configurator was to become the central element of the BMW website. It should simply be fun to configure a BMW. Huge amounts of 3D material and various functions such as a slider for direct comparison of the leathers and upholstery and the night mode to set the scene for lighting and paintwork were used. Always breathing down your neck: the loading time. And the hundreds of thousands of dependencies to ensure that a model remains buildable almost cost us our wits.