VF 3 marketing campaign: 66 hours from hype to deposits
The VF 3 marketing campaign closed orders in 66 hours on a roughly 2% discount. Here is how small brands can borrow the mechanic for Tet 2027.
At 6 a.m. on 13 May 2024, VinFast, the Vietnamese electric vehicle maker owned by Vingroup, opened deposits for the VF 3, a mini EV, at a price valid only until the end of 15 May. According to figures the company published itself in a Vingroup press release, VinFast received 27,649 orders after 66 hours. VietNamNet calculated that on average someone locked in a deposit every 8 seconds. In September 2025, the entry that retold those 66 hours, “VF 3 - From Hype to History in 66 Hours”, made by Ogilvy Vietnam for VinFast, won 2 Gold awards at the APAC Effie Awards 2025 (Effie is a marketing effectiveness award).
Our reading of the VF 3 marketing campaign: what is worth learning is how the buying moment was designed. VinFast created a short window with a start time and an end time, so curiosity about a new car had somewhere to turn into a deposit. Small brands without VinFast's budget can copy that mechanic. Hype with no way to close the order is just noise.
What did the VF 3 marketing campaign win at Effie?
The organizers announced the APAC Effie results in Singapore on 19 September 2025: 123 finalist campaigns, 81 winners, including 12 Golds, from 12 markets. According to the official winners list, VF 3 took two of those 12 Golds, in Automotive and in Shopper & e-Commerce Marketing.
Per Genk, VF 3 collected 6 awards in total: besides the 2 Golds, 2 Bronzes in Asia Pacific Brands and Marketing Disruptor, Silver in Brand of the Year and Bronze in Marketer of the Year.
The two biggest awards need to be read correctly. On the organizers' announcement page, the ranking lists “VinFast VF3” in second place for Brand of the Year and “VinFast” in third place for Marketer of the Year. The organizers also say these special awards are ranked by cumulative points from entries that won or reached the finals. In other words, those two rankings are sums of points from the category awards underneath. To understand why VinFast ranks high overall, you have to look at the individual entries, starting with the 66-hour one.
The case is still being shared with the industry. According to Campaign Brief Asia (27 August 2026), Thai Duong, Integrated Strategy Director at Ogilvy Vietnam, is on the list of speakers presenting cases at the Effie Singapore Learning Festival 2026.
Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash
Why is the Shopper & e-Commerce Gold the most interesting detail?
A new car winning Automotive is easy to predict. The second Gold sits elsewhere, and the category name says where it looks: shoppers and e-commerce. Tuổi Trẻ quoted VinFast as saying the Shopper & e-Commerce Gold relates to the first time a car in Vietnam was sold on an e-commerce platform and through livestreams with KOLs (key opinion leaders, i.e. influencers).
Selling a car worth more than 200 million dong through a livestream sounds like something from the cosmetics business. It is the same logic we covered in our piece on what shoppertainment is and how Shopee turned shopping into a show: the audience is already there, and the order button sits right under the screen. According to the Vingroup press release, more than 50% of VF 3 orders in the 66 hours were placed online.
The entry's name is worth a second look. “From Hype to History in 66 Hours” counts in hours and tells a story that runs from buzz to a sales result. There are no view counts in the title.
How was the 66-hour window built?
Broken into parts, the VF 3 mechanic is fairly simple.
Time and price: the window ran from 6:00 on 13 May to the end of 15 May 2024. The price inside the window was 235 million dong with a battery rental and 315 million dong with the battery included (Vingroup). According to VnExpress, once the offer expired, prices went back to 240 million and 322 million dong. From those two price pairs, early buyers saved 5 to 7 million dong, about 2% of the car's price.
Commitment: per VietNamNet, the deposit was 15 million dong, and per Tuổi Trẻ, quoting the company, 100% of orders were non-refundable and non-transferable.
Money barrier: the Vingroup press release says customers paid 50 to 70 million dong upfront, with the rest paid in installments of a little over 2 million dong a month for 8 years.
This is the part 126Insights finds most instructive. A discount of about 2% is far too small, on its own, to make tens of thousands of people hand over money within three days. In our reading, the deadline did that. Think of a sticky rice stall at the end of an alley that sells only until 8 a.m.: people get up early because they know late means sold out, not because the price beats the stall next door. The non-refundable deposit does the rest. It filters for people who have decided, and it turns a vague “let me think about it” into a number you can report.
According to VnExpress, the 27,649 orders were nearly 10,000 more than the Hyundai Accent, the best-selling car of 2023. One caveat: this is the number of deposit orders VinFast announced itself. Cars delivered is a different figure, and this article does not cover it.
Hype without a way to close the order is just noise
According to the Winning Tết 2027 report from YouNet Media, Tết 2026 (Lunar New Year, Vietnam's biggest shopping and gifting season) had 151 campaigns, up 14.39% from Tết 2025, but total online conversation did not grow with them. More campaigns shared a pool of discussion that did not get bigger, so each one's slice shrank. YouNet proposes measuring with CFQU (Content From Qualified Users), meaning content from high-quality users.
Measuring more carefully is a step in the right direction. Still, a ranking of online conversation does not tell you who sold anything. VinFast reported its 66-hour result as non-refundable deposits, a number that answers the question every finance director asks after a campaign.
Our position: a Tết 2027 campaign that gets social media talking all week but gives people nowhere to buy only adds noise to a season that is already loud. The question in the meeting room should change from “how do we go viral” to “where does the viewer click, and before what date”.
How can a small Vietnamese brand copy the 66-hour mechanic?
VinFast has brand awareness and the budget to livestream with KOLs. A small brand has neither, but the frame can be copied. It is the same spirit as our piece on why you should sell before you build: let customers pay first, then produce at scale.
- Set a real deadline with a date and an hour, and keep it. If a deadline is extended once, nobody believes the next one.
- Keep the early-bird offer small. With VF 3, a gap of only about 2% still came with 27,649 orders by VinFast's count; deep discounts just eat margin.
- Pick a commitment level that matches the trust customers already have in you. A non-refundable deposit is a big ask for a brand they have never bought from. A small brand can start with a refundable deposit but cap the number of slots, so scarcity does the job the deposit would do.
- Put the buy button where customers are already looking: an e-commerce platform, a livestream, a page with an order form ready.
- Give buyers something to post. This one is 126Insights' own suggestion for small brands. Suppose a ceramics workshop in Bát Tràng (a village near Hanoi famous for pottery) opens pre-orders for a Tết tea set for 72 hours and engraves the family's name on the teapot lid. Every customer who receives the set has a ready reason to take a photo and show it off.
- Report results in orders. Views should be a secondary metric, used only to see which channel brought people in.
What time does your Tết 2027 campaign expire?
The end of the year is launch and pre-order season, and also when it is easiest to confuse discounting with closing. We covered this in our piece on how Vietnamese brands should run 11.11 as double-date sales lose their pull. VF 3 shows that a clear deadline plus a real commitment can do more than a deep discount.
Before you approve a Tết 2027 plan, try writing two lines on a sheet of paper: what time and date the campaign ends, and where the viewer clicks to order. If you cannot fill in either line, what you have is a plan to get attention. The selling part is still unwritten.