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February 24th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, Mass., that makes a full platform of marketing software, including marketing analytics tools.
This year, Chevrolet‘s Super Bowl ad for its Sonic hatchback had its share of white-knuckle stunts. For those who missed it, the hatchback skydived, bungee jumped and executed a kickflip.
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But those stunts were child’s play compared to the risk Chevy seemed to be taking. After all, the ad featured no actual reasons to buy the car, no mentions of gas mileage, pricing or even its iPhone/iPad compatibility. The only thing you could surmise from seeing the ad is that the car might be useful if you and it were ever flung out of a plane.
Yet Matt Scarlett, Sonic’s advertising manager, says the stunt-ridden ad was actually the safest choice. Canvassing consumers in the younger-skewing millennial demo revealed that their flashy approach got the strongest response by far. “We said, ‘OK, if you saw an ad like that, would you engage with the brand’s website to learn more?'” recalls Scarlett. “Pretty much everyone said they would, if only to see how the heck they did it.”
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This is one way to market cars to Gen Yers. When your target demo lives on Facebook and zones out when you show them a standard car ad with stereotypical beauty shots and performance claims, you have to mess with the formula a bit.
That’s especially true if you’re an underdog brand. In some ways, the auto industry is like tech: There are brands like Apple, which can create buzz merely by teasing new releases. But those that lack this built-in sense of drama have to create their own trans-media narratives.
The progenitor of this approach is Audi‘s Art of the Heist, a 2005 campaign for the A3. The carmaker, working with New York agency Campfire, concocted a story about the car being stolen that included a game replete with online and offline clues about the car’s whereabouts. “Stunts have been a viable way of generating a lot of conversation with a relatively minimal investment thanks to social media,” says Jeremiah Rosen, president and partner of Campfire. “The difference between how we sell beer and how we sell automobiles is dramatically different — longer purchase consideration and longer ownership. Given that the purchase cycle for a car is famously long, starting the conversation with a spreadable, buzzworthy stunt is a very good way to drive attention. It starts the conversation and moves the consumer toward consideration.”
Agency 180LA made the same calculation. When it won the Mitsubishi account in mid-2010, the agency’s assignment was to generate buzz and show off the 2011 Outlander Sport compact crossover’s features. The agency’s solution was “Live Drive,” which was billed as the world’s first online test drive. The brand created a microsite where users could (after getting a code), remotely steer an Outlander Sport in the Mojave Desert.
Mitsubishi followed that effort with a stunt in February 2011 that had the Outlander and Outlander Sport breaking Guinness World Records in arctic conditions in Ghost Lake, Canada. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” says Gavin Lester, creative director of 180LA. “We are outspent 10-to-one or 30-to-one by our competitors, so we had to do something different.”
Toyota‘s Prius doesn’t suffer under quite the same constraints. Yet, the brand launched its own record-breaking frenzy during two 10-hour webcasts in March 2011. Unlike Mitsubishi’s Guinness campaign, though, this record-breaking attempt was more about whimsy than product attributes. Among the records sought: “Most shadow animals made with Prius LED headlights in two minutes.”
Melissa Eccles, associated director of integrated productions for Saatchi Saatchi LA, the agency that worked on that effort, says once again the usual claims about mileage and LED headlights would have likely fallen on deaf ears. “It grabs people’s attention and creates a different channel to connect with a generation that is turned off by traditional approaches to advertising,” she says of the effort. “It changes the conversation, giving people a means to participate in an experience, versus being advertised to.”
Not everyone agrees with that logic, though. Todd Turner, owner of Car Concepts, a Thousand Oaks, Calif., consultancy, points out that there are still lots of car brands that continue to emphasize product attributes in their advertising. Two other Super Bowl advertisers — Hyundai and the Ford Silverado — stuck to that formula this year. Turner says that’s smart.
“I think that all these companies [doing stunts] run the risk of devaluing their brands,” Turner says of Chevy Sonic and others. Turner notes that Volkswagen’s ads from the ’60s were lighthearted, but also provided good reasons to buy the cars, like reliability. “To build a car brand that ends up on people’s shopping lists, it has to be something that retains an image for them. That’s where [these brands] are lacking. There’s no definable reason to buy the product. They’re focusing too much on what goes viral, what gets teens’ attention.”
Scarlett, however, is happy for the moment to be getting attention for the Sonic. The Super Bowl ad has gotten almost 2 million views on YouTube at this writing and has about 100,000 more Facebook fans than the Ford Fiesta. Scarlett says when OK Go’s official video for “Needing/Getting” — the song featured in the Super Bowl ad — hit 10 million views in five days, “That’s when we knew we really hit it. We really connected with people.”
Whether they’ll go out and buy the car remains to be seen.
Series supported by HubSpot
The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, Mass., that makes a full platform of marketing software, including marketing analytics tools.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Secret London
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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