Car with GPS system for the confused from Nissan. This print campaign announcing the GPS facility of the car is features some junctions and boards In Egypt with contradictory and confusing road/street signs. The campaign, developed by TBWA, Cairo, is based on the factual presentation and hence manages to bring home the message. In one place The Arabic sign reads: Abdallah Fekry Street
The English sign reads: Abd El Salam Zaki Street
ACDelco is a subsidiary of American car firm, General Motors. Despite carrying parts for all makes of vehicle, there was widespread misconception in the UAE market that the firm only serviced American cars.
Traffic statistics suggested that drivers spent an average of 4 hours on the road in Dubai. Memac, Ogilvy and Mather use the trucks themselves as mobile advertisements. Using the free advertising space on the side of ACDelco trucks, they were branded with a fun, simple slogan, “Yes! We also have parts for this car!” with arrows pointing at passing vehicles.
The trucks drove through key areas, and parked in strategically visible sites, and allowed the passing traffic to complete the artwork. Achieving an estimate 3.2 million impressions per month, the campaign increased store traffic, and helped to change public perceptions of the firm’s products. The branded trucks were part of a larger campaign that saw a 28% rise in end of year sales figures.
Every brand must have an application these days, or so it seems. To launch its own incarnation of the iPhone app, Toyota turned to UGC and encouraged passers-by to doodle on the prominent Reuters billboard overlooking Times Square in New York.
Billboards have become a secondary medium in recent years. Most brands see them as an add-on, rather than an integral part of a campaign, as they used to be. The type of digital interaction being utilised by Toyota, however, could see billboards regain a place in marketer’s hearts.
Toyota took over the Reuters billboard for a limited 3 day run. Members of the public sketched simple designs on a handily available Prius app, these sketches were then sent directly to the digital billboard and layered over the original display ad for Toyota’s iPhone application. A web cam on the Reuters site allows users to see what is currently being sketched and footage of passers-by interacting with the billboard was seeded onto YouTube. Available to download from the iPhone store, the app allows users to take a virtual tour of the new Prius, compare colours and watch videos – as well as interact with Toyota billboards, of course.
By creating a hybrid advert from the public’s doodles and the original billboard design, Toyota advertised its new app in a way that also promoted the core value of its Prius model.
Joy is the scent of a new BMW. To make your dream BMW a reality, visit your BMW retailer orwww.bmwfinance.ca and explore all of your leasing and financing options today. BMW Financial Services
Ford recently wrapped the first chapter of its Fiesta Movement, leaving us distinctly wiser about marketing in the digital space. Ford gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission every month. And away they went. At the direction of Ford and their own imagination, "agents" used their Fiestas to deliver Meals On Wheels. They used them to take Harry And David treats to the National Guard. They went looking for adventure, some to wrestle alligators, others actually to elope. All of these stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. The campaign was an important moment for Ford. It wanted in to the small car market, and it hadn't sold a subcompact car in the United States since it discontinued the Aspire in 1997. And it was an important moment for marketing. The Fiesta Movement promised to be the most visible, formative social media experiment for the automotive world. Get this right and Detroit marketing would never be the same. I had the good fortune to interview Bud Caddell the other day and he helped me see the inner workings of the Fiesta Movement. Bud works at Undercurrent, the digital strategy firm responsible for the campaign. Under the direction of Jim Farly, Group VP at Ford and Connie Fontaine, manager of brand content there, Undercurrent decided to depart from the viral marketing rule book. Bud told me they were not interested in the classic early adopters, the people who act as influencers for the rest of us. Undercurrent wanted to make contact with a very specific group of people, a passionate group of culture creators. Bud said,
The idea was: let's go find twenty-something YouTube storytellers who've learned how to earn a fan community of their own. [People] who can craft a true narrative inside video, and let's go talk to them. And let's put them inside situations that they don't get to normally experience/document. Let's add value back to their life. They're always looking, they're always hungry, they're always looking for more content to create. I think this gets things exactly right. Undercurrent grasped the underlying motive (and the real economy) at work in the digital space. People are not just telling stories for the sake of telling stories, though certainly, these stories have their own rewards. They were making narratives that would create economic value.
The digital space is an economy after all. People are creating, exchanging and capturing value, as they would in any marketplace. But this is a gift economy, where the transactions are shot through with cultural content and creation. In a gift economy, value tends to move not in little "tit for tat" transactions, but in long loops, moving between consumers before returning, augmented, to the corporation. In this case, adventures inspired by Undercurrent and Ford return as meaning for the brand and value for the corporation. Undercurrent was reaching out to consumers not just to pitch them, but to ask them to help pitch the product. And the pitch was not merely a matter of "buzz." Undercurrent wanted consumers to help charge the Fiesta with glamor, excitement, and oddity — to complete the "meaning manufacture" normally conducted only by the agency.
This would be the usual "viral marketing" if all the consumer was called upon to do was to talk up Fiesta. But Undercurrent was proposing a richer bargain, enabling and incenting "agents" to create content for their own sakes, to feed their own networks, to build their own profiles...and in the process to contribute to the project of augmenting Fiesta's brand. Fiesta's campaign worked because it was founded on fair trade. Both the brand and the agent were giving and getting. And this shows us a way out of the accusations that now preoccupy some discussions of social media marketing. With their gift economy approach, Ford and Undercurrent found a way to transcend all the fretting about "what bright, shining object can we invent to get the kids involved?" and, from the other side, all that "oh, there he goes again, it's the Man ripping off digital innocents." It's a happier, more productive, more symmetrical, relationship than these anxieties imply. Hat's off to Farley and Fontaine. The effects of the campaign were sensational. Fiesta got 6.5 million YouTube views and 50,000 requests for information about the car — virtually none from people who already had a Ford in the garage. Ford sold 10,000 units in the first six days of sales. The results came at a relatively small cost. The Fiesta Movement is reputed to have cost a small fraction of the typical national TV campaign.
There is an awful lot of aimless experiment in the digital space these days. A lot of people who appear not to have a clue are selling digital marketing advice. I think the Fiesta Movement gives us new clarity. It's a three-step process.
Engage culturally creative consumers to create content.
Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency.
Craft this is a way that it rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.
In effect, outsource some of our marketing work. And in the process, turn the brand itself into an "agent" and an enabler of cultural production that is interesting and fun. Now the marketer is working with contemporary culture instead of against it. And everyone is well-served.
Grant McCracken is a research affiliate at MIT and the author of Chief Culture Officer (Basic Books).
Honda Brand campaign began in August when Honda launched its official Facebook page (www.facebook.com/honda) with a social-experiment application to recruit Honda fans to show how everyone knows someone who loves a Honda. Once users joined the social experiment, they could become a fan of Honda and a handful of specific Honda vehicles. As of early October, all current Honda vehicles now have fan pages too. Once users participated in the experiment, they see how they are connected to their friends, view a chain of friends in their Honda web, and find out just how long their chain extends around the world. Three early participants in the Facebook social-experiment were cast to appear in the new Honda Brand spots. All others featured in the spots are actual Honda owners and were selected through real-people casting in New York, N.Y.; Boulder, Colo.; and Charleston, S.C., where the spots were filmed. The multimedia campaign includes one 30-second spot and two 15-second spots. An online hub (http://love.honda.com) for the Brand campaign, contains all three TV spots plus extra footage in a connected, sequential chain. Within the chain of spots, users can click on the Honda owner cast members and listen to more than 20 interviews of cast members talking about their personal Honda experiences.
Advertising Agency: RPA, Santa Monica, CA, USA
Creative Directors: Joe Baratelli, Patrick Mendelson
Art Director: Hobart Birmingham
Copywriters: Perrin Anderson, Tylynne McCauley
Other additional credits:
ECD: David Smith
CD: Joe Baratelli
CD: Patrick Mendelson
Jr. Art Director: Brian Farkas
EP: Gary Paticoff
Agency Producer: Brian Donnelly
Car manufacturers are always looking for new ways to appeal to the female market and Volkswagen is no exception. To coincide with the launch of its new VW Polo, Volkswagen is holding a classic film screening specifically designed to lure women into its showrooms.
Polo’s Timeless Film Festival will see a classic chick-flick being brought back to the silver screen. The multi platform campaign incorporating radio, direct mail, POS, local press, email and, of course, cinema is Volkswagen’s most expensive to date, with total spend being put at £1 million mark.
Initially, women are being driven to a dedicated website where they are encouraged to vote on which of the ten classic films listed they would like to see brought back to the cinema. Users can register to receive two free tickets to see the most popular film from the list at one of the 180 cinemas participating nationwide. Regular updates will be given as the screening approaches and VW Polo cardboard cut-outs will be placed in each cinema. An ad featuring legendary movie voice-over man, Redd Pepper, will also play in cinemas nationwide.
The campaign will culminate with the VW Polo Timeless Film Festival at the end of October.
In September, Volkswagen launched www.rolighetsteorin.se, an creative initiative to test if fun could change the behavior of people. The campaign has become a huge success in the last couple of days with a tremendous amount of views for the videos that Volkswagen subtly seed with this campaign.
Read on for the full statistics on the campaign and my personal view on this already strong marketing case in social media.
Last Friday, Niels wrote the following summary, here on ViralBlog:
With this new campaign, developed by DDB Stockholm, Volkswagen turned a subway staircase in Stockholm, Sweden into a giant piano as part of their ‘Theory of Fun’ campaign. The effort is just one stunt that appears on the carmaker’s Rolighetsteorin.se website, which showcases efforts to get people to change by simply making things more fun. The Giant Piano clip got over 500,000 views on YouTube in just over two weeks.
The videos are aiming to change peoples lazy behavior by showing them the fun side of acting environmental responsible. As for the carmaker’s own contribution, “Volkswagen’s answer to the theory will be presented at a later stage on a separate website amongst other media,” says DDB Stockholm creative director Andreas Dahlqvist. “The site will display their whole range of environment technologies and cars—many, many fun ways to do something for the environment.”
Let’s take a look at the already launched videos:
Piano Staircase
The video received 1.200.000+ views in 4 days. Plus various copies with over 500.000 views. Minor detail: The original Swedish version - Pianotrappan - rolighetsteorin.se - “only” got 680.000+ views in 20 days.
The World’s Deepest Bin
This video received a bit less views, 88.000 views in 4 days. Minor detail: The original Swedish version - Världens djupaste soptunna - rolighetsteorin.se - “only” got 129.000+ views in 20 days.
Bottle Bank Arcade
About the platform
The platform bundles the videos and encourages people to submit their own ideas. The winner will be granted with a cash prize of 2500 euros. I sure do hope that Volkswagen promotes these actions and let people vote, share and encourage others with micro interactions. This way, the behavior change also comes from the people within.
Statistics on the videos
Lets take a look at the conversation market. What did the campaign do to the conversations? To check this out, we’ll have a look at Twitter.
Trendistic statistics on the word “piano”
It’s incredible, when you look at the statistics, you can see a minor trend on the word piano, just shortly after the launch of the videos. This means that people started to talk more about pianos then before the campaign. Next to all the regular conversations about pianos, a lot of the ones including a link direct to the advertisement page. Source: Twitter Search.
Trendistic statistics on the word “fun”
Another nice detail is that Volkswagen is being associated with fun a lot on Twitter. Looking at these results, you can see that Volkswagen is being mentioned several times per hour with the word fun and a link to the campaign.
YouTube statistics on Piano Staircase
Unfortunately, the extended statistics have been disabled for both the Swedish YouTube videos, so we couldn’t find out whether these videos spread globally as well as the English ones. However, the English versions did show the extended statistics. Let’s check out the ones from the piano stairs video to see the popularity in a global perspective.
YouTube statistics on the video: viral growth
Even though the image above is from such a short period, its still incredible to see the large growth in such a short time. Also the amount of ratings, comments and favorites show people like the video.
YouTube statistics on the video: global reach
When you look at the global reach, you can see the video has worldwide popularity, which is an interesting fact. Humor and interests aren’t human aspects that have the same values on every person on this planet. It’s good to see the video has been liked in America, Australia and Russia.
Looking at the aspects of the Volkswagen videos, it leaves no doubt that the Never Hide films gave some good inspiration to DDB Stockholm, the agency behind the films. The films are also not based on the core message of the brand, they could be a start of consistent line of communication, are highly entertaining, aren’t just about the product and could have been done by average Joe.
Could it be that Volkswagen is following Ray-Ban’s successful footsteps by creating successful, fun and creative videos to feed the entertainment market? I certainly love this campaign of Volkswagen and hope they’ll receive the viral success they deserve!
Aviva wanted to engage consumers when they would be in the right frame of mind to think about car insurance. The obvious solution was to target motorists when they were actually on the road, so the insurer decided to advertise with In Your Space.
In Your Space displays advertising on the sides and back of its trucks. According to the media owner, 64% of motor vehicle traffic is via motorways and major A-roads, which are covered by its moving billboards. It recently carried out a £70,000, 12-month long research programme to provide the likes of Aviva with specific targets.
Aviva’s campaign is running on a total of 210 ad sites - termed as ‘high reach billboards’. The lorries carrying the ads will cover more than one million miles of road. If estimates prove correct, the campaign will communicate to over 24 million motorists every month, with each motorist expected to see the adverts at least 7 times, delivering a total of 508 million impacts over the three-month campaign period.
With TV advertising overloaded with insurance companies, it makes sense for a car insurance firm such as Aviva to move its advertising into a more relevant space for its target market, although the environmental impact of such advertising may concern insurance customers in the future.
A Continuous Focus on the Ideal Visitor Experience
Summary
In this paper we show how account planning kept a continuous focus on visitors’ needs, helping Volkswagen.co.uk reach its highest share of visitors for automotive manufacturers’ websites. By 2007, the Volkswagen.co.uk website was six years old and needed a redesign. Besides, customer behaviour online had changed. Visitors had become more demanding of their online experiences as more of them got online; the web had become more sophisticated and so had visitors’ skills. In the automotive category, more people than ever were researching what car to buy online and manufacturers’ websites, to a degree, had taken on the role of dealerships. We identified insights for each of the key stages most people would pass when buying and owning a car. Our website had to help people progress to a further stage by addressing unmet needs. Through a continuous focus on the visitor experience and a planning effort to remain involved throughout the eighteen months of the project, we ensured that the website delivered at the end was aligned with our initial vision. Every part of the site is built around the ideal experience that online car buyers would expect from Volkswagen and makes every stage of buying a car more intuitive.
Introduction
In this paper we will show how account planning kept a continuous focus on visitors’ needs over eighteen months of website development, helping Volkswagen.co.uk reach its highest share of visitors for automotive manufacturers’ websites (from 9.2% in 2007 to 10.4% in 2008).
Making the case for a new website
By 2007, the Volkswagen.co.uk website was six years old and ancient by web standards. It was time for a redesign. While the current design had been efficient at delivering information to visitors, it didn’t provide a brand experience and didn’t help move people towards purchase as much as it could.
The first thing we had to do was to make a case for why Volkswagen should go to the expense of creating a new website from scratch rather than keeping the one they had.
The business case was largely already made: we had just finished writing an IPA award paper in 2006 showing how a more engaging experience for Volkswagen’s Golf GTI resulted in more profitable configurations for Volkswagen; we forecasted a similar improvement in profitability for other models if we were to build a new, more engaging website.
More compelling, however, was the evidence that buyer behaviour had changed in the six years since the last design. The arrival of the web had transformed the car buying environment. More people than ever were researching what car to buy online.
In fact, by 2007, the Internet was the first source used to research cars. 57% of all buyers tried online research before using other media. 80% of consumers used the Internet as an information source during the vehicle buying process. Prospects spent more time online with the brand than in any other medium; of an average nineteen hours researching their next car purchase, eleven of them were spent online.
As a result, visitors knew what they wanted, how they wanted it, and what they were prepared to pay for it. Manufacturers’ websites, to a degree, had taken on the role of dealerships. Rather than visiting a selection of dealerships, people visited a selection of websites; according to a study published by Network Q, the average customer visited less than three showrooms before buying in 2007 (compared to six in 2001).
How the competition reacted
Despite an opportunity to address these issues, most manufacturers’ websites simply continued to use their websites as a confusing hard sell environment. A typical competitor’s website bombarded visitors with hundreds of choices, thousands of pages and cluttered imagery, with small cars fighting large cars and luxury cars for page space, with navigable items and links inserted for fear of what might happen if customers weren’t told to do one thing or another.
Understanding people and modelling their behaviour
Similar to the process that Volkswagen takes when building its cars, building the new Volkswagen.co.uk site started with a thorough understanding of people. By modelling the behaviour of different customers, we were able to build a website that makes every stage of buying a Volkswagen more intuitive.
Even though people had changed their research methods, the stages of the buying process itself remained similar. We visited dealerships and interviewed people. We also drew on New Car Buyer Survey results and 39 years of agency experience of speaking with car buyers.
This allowed us to identify thirteen key stages of purchase and ownership. These were not a linear journey that all people took, but were rather important stages most people would pass when buying and owning a car.
The brand experience had to help people progress to a further stage, particularly through bridging the gap between consideration and purchase. Having customer insights for each of the key stages helped us to come up with features that would address unmet user needs.
We also looked at the shopping experience on other websites outside of the automotive category. Visitors had become more demanding of their online experiences as more of them got online; the web had become more sophisticated and so had visitors’ skills. Though mainly driven by other industries, innovation was on the rise.
Our strategy, therefore, considered three major behavioural frameworks: the shift in the car buying process towards online research; the 13 stages of car purchase and ownership; and increasingly sophisticated user expectations.
Planning the ideal experience
Based on our research and insights, we created a video briefing to inspire our team by outlining how we could take an approach different to that of our competitors. This was our challenge to the team:
Our idea was to put the customer, not the brand, at the centre.
This was translated into an overall conceptual model for how we wanted people to experience the site.
Keeping the focus on the visitor
The true value of account planning was shown in the eighteen months between the development of the vision and delivery of the website. Planners sat amongst user experience architects, creative teams and developers throughout.
Making the video briefing and creating the conceptual model had been vital steps towards designing the right experience on the website. We knew, however, that the project would take at least a year to complete, so we translated the vision and conceptual model into a set of user experience principles, which allowed us to remain involved throughout the project. In this way we would ensure that the website delivered at the end was aligned with our initial vision.
These were the five user experience principles we set for the broader team:
The site will be a destination for anyone interested in buying a car and become the most visited automotive website in the UK with its new features and functions as the main attractions.
The car models are the heroes of the Volkswagen brand, each with its own features, benefits and personalities. Each will be given a separate pedestal to stand on, even though the site is not about creating model-based campaigns.
The site will become the hub of Volkswagen; bringing together the brand, their retailers and customers, and strengthening the relationship between the three parties.
The site will reflect the brand essence by demonstrating Volkswagen’s better thinking in all business areas and through all page details.
The site will recognise the distinct needs of different audience groups. We will not try to be all things to all people.
From these principles came a wall of briefs.
Every corner of the website experience was subject to planning scrutiny; each stage of the visitor’s journey was issued a flexible brief. The cascading nature of the different experiences created dependencies between each brief that required day-to-day attention.
An added benefit to having the living wall of briefs came during measurement phase. When it was time to work with the website measurement technology provider, we knew exactly how we wanted each part of the site to be measured because we knew how visitors would ideally behave.
The creative result
After eighteen months, the result is a site that looks and behaves in a markedly different way. Right from the homepage you can see that the experience is designed around visitors’ needs. We don’t bombard our visitors with hundreds of choices; instead we highlight the five most important ones.
Another example of our visitor focus is the model search and selection function. Where our competitors ask you to select models for inspection simply by model name and shape, the Volkswagen site allows people to find a car suitable for their needs using a series of easy-to-understand filters based on key criteria such as shape, size, price, engine type, performance, or fuel efficiency. As you change your criteria the relevant models appear or disappear, leaving you with only the Volkswagens that are right for you.
Once you’ve selected a model, the website presents you with a bit of the ownership dream. During our research we found that people need to imagine what it might be like to own a GTI, or in this case, a Touareg 4x4. Within the thirteen stage buying process, this is our opportunity to build additional consideration and desire for a model.
The true heart of the website experience, however, is the configurator. The configurator smoothes out the complexity of buying a Volkswagen and presents the customer with a personalised, enjoyable experience. A fully animated interview process allows you to watch your dream Volkswagen being built, from getting the chosen paint colour sprayed on to finding the right finance package.
Finally, we knew that if the website was really replacing showroom visits, the following stage would be buying a Volkswagen. It was therefore important for us to allow visitors to find a retailer, choose one based on location or other customers’ recommendations and book a test drive, all directly on the website.
In the end, the creative result was a predictable outcome of our process. Every part of the site (of which we’ve only shown a portion) is built around the ideal experience that online car buyers would expect from Volkswagen. On launch Volkswagen.co.uk looked and behaved like no other manufacturer’s website. The constant focus on visitor experience has paid off.
The results, so far (2007 vs. 2008)
Despite car sales being down by 11% year over year in the UK, we have seen noticeable improvements since launch. With visitors up by four percentage points, Volkswagen.co.uk became for the first time the most visited automotive manufacturer’s website in the UK in November 2008, beating industry sales leaders Ford and Vauxhall.
The people who used the site are now more likely to buy: the ratio of online test drive requests to retail sales went up by 8%.
According to Psyma, a cross manufacturer website survey, between October 2007 and October 2008 overall satisfaction was up by six percentage points (from 70% to 76%). The number of people agreeing with the statement “The website makes me feel positive towards the VW brand” increased by five percentage points (from 68% to 73%) and the number of people agreeing with the statement “The site has exactly the information and function that I require” was up by seven percentage points (from 54% to 61%).
The initial results are encouraging despite the current economic climate. But what excites us most is that we have established a visitor-focused planning process that will continue building on this early success.
