The launch of the new Audi A3 in the United States has started off with a nice bang, with 2,159 A3 sedans sold in the month of April (beating Mercedes-Benz’s CLA sales by a couple hundred). The phrase “paid my dues” has been one of the leitmotifs of the Audi A3 launch, both on social media and as part of the “Dues” A3 TV advert. “Paid my dues” comes from the first line of Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, the song used on that ad.
As the Audi A3 campaign continued, the #PaidMyDues hashtag started to come into use. Back on April 30th, Audi announced an Audi A3 live event and asked their fans to submit their #PaidMyDues stories on Twitter, Vine and Instagram:
15+ creators. 6 hours. 1 remarkable event. Be part of our most ambitious project yet. Share your story: #PaidMyDues http://t.co/EKLjxxR6AT
— Audi (@Audi) April 30, 2014
I decided to jump into the fun with my own #PaidMyDues story and sent the following:
I’ve helped move datacenters, working through many a nights, pounded out hundreds of thousands lines of code. #PaidMyDues #LoveMyS5 @Audi — Audi For Life (@AudiForLife) May 6, 2014
On May 7th, Audi chose a wide selection of people’s #PaidMyDues stories and turned them over to an ensemble of artists to create works of art around those stories for the live event and stream.
Since I was working, I had the live stream running in the background and would peek over when I had a few moments of free time. I used the stream’s DVR feature to jump back and forth to see what I had missed. While scanning through bits towards the latter part of the event, I noticed something popped up on the video that included the word “datacenters”. So, I rolled the video back and caught the following:
Although it was an abridged version of my tweet, it was enough for me to get all excited and may have squeed out loud. The Sumi Ink Club had used the contents of my tweet and incorporated it into the large doodle painting created live for the event.
The Unofficial Audi Blog took a photo of the printed out tweet that the artists were using to re-create in the painting.
On my way home, I got a notification on my phone that Audi USA mentioned me on Twitter. Lo and behold:
@AudiForLife All that hard work paid off. Here’s a @sumiinkclub collaborative painting, made for you. #paidmydues pic.twitter.com/fbrNgO3DIS — Audi (@Audi) May 8, 2014
Audi sent a tweet of the section of the painting containing the completed doodle based on my #PaidMyDues tweet. To say that I’m honored and thankful is an understatement.
Thank you Audi USA and Sumi Ink Club for turning my #PaidMyDues into a doodle and a huge kudos to everyone involved in planning, setting up, managing and all of the guys and gals creating works of art for #PaidMyDues.