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When DEEPAL, the EV and hybrid marque from Altayer Motors, prepared to launch the G318 in the UAE, the brief was simple to state and hard to deliver: create real buzz around a brand-new model, in a market where DEEPAL had no prior social proof, no influencer history, and no benchmark to lean on.
Boomerang, a Dubai-based influencer marketing agency, was brought in to design and run the launch campaign end to end — from influencer selection through to the brand's own activation event.
Brand Snapshot
- Brand: DEEPAL — a Chinese automotive brand launching a new vehicle in the UAE
- Campaign: DEEPAL G318 Launch
- Market: United Arab Emirates
- Platforms: Instagram & TikTok
- Campaign Type: Brand awareness — new product launch
- Audience: Families and adventure seekers, mid-to-high income, Arabic-speaking, with a strong interest in cars and premium lifestyle
The Challenge: Launching an Unknown Brand into a Crowded Market
The UAE automotive space is one of the most competitive verticals in Gulf social media — saturated with established marques, motoring pages, and car-content creators with built-in audiences. DEEPAL was launching the G318 with none of that legacy awareness behind it.
The brand needed a campaign that could do two things at once: generate a high volume of organic conversation around the launch, and position the G318 specifically as the practical choice for families and adventure seekers — not just another spec sheet in a crowded segment.
Boomerang's Strategy: Automotive Authority Meets Family Lifestyle
Rather than spreading the campaign across broad reach, Boomerang built a focused roster of 10 UAE-based influencers, hand-picked from the automotive and family-lifestyle niches, with 5 additional creators added specifically to amplify the brand's launch event. All 15 attended the activation in person.
- Influencer Mix: Macro and mega-tier creators with established automotive and family-lifestyle audiences in the UAE
- Selection Criteria: UAE-based, with content history in automotive reviews or family/lifestyle content
- Content Format: Instagram & TikTok Stories for the launch event; long-form video for the test-drive experience
- Event Integration: All 15 influencers attended the DEEPAL G318 launch event in person
Content & Creative Direction
The content strategy split into two distinct formats matched to two distinct moments in the customer journey:
- Event coverage (Stories): real-time, authentic Instagram and TikTok Stories from the G318 launch event, designed to create immediacy and FOMO around the reveal
- Test-drive content (Video): longer-form video content built around the car's family and adventure positioning, giving influencers space to demonstrate the vehicle in real driving scenarios
By pairing in-the-moment Story content with considered test-drive video, the Automotive influencer campaign covered both the awareness spike of launch night and the deeper, trust-building content that supports a high-consideration automotive purchase.
Why It Worked
- Niche-matched creators — automotive and family-lifestyle influencers, not broad-reach generalists, gave the content credibility with the exact audience DEEPAL needed to reach
- Format matched to moment — Stories for the live energy of the launch event, video for the considered, demonstrative content a car purchase decision requires
- In-person event integration — having all 15 influencers physically present at the launch produced more authentic, harder-to-fake content than remote or seeded-product activations typically generate
- Experience of Boomerang as Automotive influencer marketing agency.
Lessons for Future Launch Campaigns
The DEEPAL G318 launch reinforced a pattern Boomerang sees consistently with new-to-market automotive brands in the UAE: a tightly curated, niche-aligned influencer roster combined with event-based content outperforms broader, less targeted activations — even without any prior brand benchmark to build from.
Conclusion: A Launch Built for the UAE Family Driver
The DEEPAL G318 campaign shows what's possible when an automotive launch is built around audience fit rather than reach alone. By combining automotive credibility with family-lifestyle relevance, Boomerang helped DEEPAL introduce a brand-new model to the UAE market and generate 49M+ impressions — turning a launch with zero prior brand history into one of the standout automotive stories of the quarter.
For brands entering the UAE automotive market for the first time, DEEPAL's results show that the right influencer mix can replace years of brand-building momentum with a single, well-executed campaign.
Planning a brand launch in the UAE? Let's talk about how a focused, niche-matched influencer strategy can turn your next launch into measurable impressions, engagement, and demand.
