Volkswagen: The Tough Sell [casefilm]

Credits & Description:

Category: Automotive
Media: Online
Agency: DDB
Client: Volkswagen Australia
Brand: Volkswagen
Company: DDB Sydney, Sydney
Target: Australia · Asia Pacific
Group Strategy Director: Samuel Payne, DDB
Senior Copywriter: Matt Chandler, DDB
Art Director: Ben Pierce, DDB
Chief Creative Officer: Toby Talbot, DDB
Creative Director: Cam Hoelter, DDB
Business Director: Carla Hizon, DDB
Managing Partner: Amanda Wheeler, DDB
Creative Technology Director: shaun oconnor, DDB
Group Creative Partner: Pete Galmes, DDB
Marketing Specialist: Peter Watkins, Volkswagen Australia
Marketing Manager: Peter Stewart, Volkswagen Australia
General Manager, Marketing: Ben Wilks, Volkswagen Australia
Features: Facebook Platform, Facebook Pixel, Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, Reach & Target Blocks, Carousel Ads, Lookalike Audiences, Custom Audiences, Video Ads
Language: English (UK)
Objectives: Awareness, Preference, Intent, Sales, Brand Building
Tags: Automotive, Asia Pacific, English (UK), Facebook Platform, Facebook Pixel, Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, Reach & Target Blocks, Carousel Ads, Lookalike Audiences, custom audiences, Video Ads, Awareness, Preference, Intent, Sales, Online  
Campaign Description
1. Things are different Down Under
In most countries around the world, the Volkswagen Golf is the ultimate hatchback.
It’s a car with countless fans who wouldn’t dream of buying anything else.
“It’s hard to shift the feeling that this is pretty much the only car you need.”
Top Gear
Australians don’t see it this way.
When Aussies look at a Golf, they see a small city car that doesn’t seem at home in Australia.
They see something built to comfortably traverse cobbled side streets and speed down Autobahns, not handle our scorching heat, endless roads, dusty terrain and corrosive sea-air.
2. Unfair Competition
The competition makes matters worse.
In Europe and the US, Japanese and Korean car manufacturers have historically been seen as inferior. It’s why Kia introduced a seven year warranty, why Toyota created Lexus and why Hyundai recently hired most of Audi’s design team.
In Australia this couldn’t be further from the truth.
The likes of Toyota, Mazda and Hyundai are seen as the benchmark.
They’re the market leaders by volume, but also by reputation – they make great quality cars.
It all comes down to the way Aussies use their cars and what they’ve come to expect from them. One industry journalist put it well:
“…we don’t want a car that needs to be looked after like a Swiss watch. Aussies buy something when they know it can handle itself and is up to the job…whatever the job.”
Interview with carsale.com.au journalist
3. Perception vs. Reality
In reality, the Golf is capable of handling Australia.
The technology and engineering you find in a Volkswagen means it will perform better than the average Toyota, Hyundai or Mazda equivalent in any environment.
But buying a car isn’t a box-ticking exercise. The car market is an emotional one; built on insightful, entertaining stories delivered at scale.
Our brief was to create such a story that would address these misconceptions; we needed to make the Golf a genuine alternative.
Campaign Goals
4. Tell our story at scale
Stories like Inception, House of Cards and Call of Duty have fundamentally changed our content appetites. It’s been a while since we’ve sat on our sofa, hot with anticipation to see the latest TV ad from Volkswagen.
We all spend our time flicking through Newsfeed whilst Netflix is streaming in the background.
With this in mind, we challenged ourselves to deliver greater business impact by reimagining the nature of a broadcast campaign; we wanted to create a new shape that worked with the most popular video platform in Australia.
Reach wasn’t a problem. Nearly every Australian who uses the internet uses Facebook.
If anything the platform is so efficient with video, we immediately worried about frequency. By committing to spending our TV budget on Facebook, it turned our four-week TV campaign into six-months of video activity at a frequency of roughly 10 per week.
Even a blockbuster ad like “The Force” from Volkswagen would become a little irritating if that appeared in Newsfeed semi-permanently.
It quickly became obvious that we didn’t need ads for Facebook, we needed to create a story that perfectly suited Newsfeed and the way people use it. We needed to earn an audience, fit in with their current behavior and complement the platform – but we didn’t want this to be a well thought-out extension of our TV work, Facebook was to be our primary broadcast channel.
So how do you write a story to last six months, be told in forty parts and fit in the palm of someone’s hand?
5. Content Pods
Our approach was to create a content pod system.
Each pod included about ten assets optimized for Newsfeed best practice. We had still images, looped GIFs, short films and long format film – all intended to work together over a five-week period.
We created five pods in total, giving us six months of content – but crucially it was one story.
Campaign Performance
6. Our most effective TV campaign that never ran on TV
This campaign was some of the most effective activity Volkswagen has ever created in Australia.
It had a bigger impact on internal tracking than any previous big-budget TV campaign and we also experienced significant shifts in national third-party tracking.
We didn’t just see lower funnel consideration shift (as we’d expect from an online campaign with lots of product detail), there was a significant impact on brand perception measures for both Volkswagen and the Golf (‘Valuable’ +16pts, Innovative +36pts, High Resale Value +24pts)
Our content approach meant we could use assets at every stage of the customer’s journey – working the whole funnel. Our films could effectively build the brand, whilst some of the detailed product content could take each customer through to purchase with a dealer.
Crucially, our story remained the same throughout this journey. Tom and his efforts in Blinman proved to be an effective way of starting a range of different conversations with all sorts of customers.
Perhaps most impressive was the national consideration measure. We always intended to tell a story that made Golf more relevant to Australia and the Aussie car buyer, and as a direct result of our activity, Golf consideration hit an all time high (since we started measuring consideration in 2007).
There were also significant positive shifts in share of intention and advertising recall; to all intents and purposes, our activity on Facebook was having the type of impact we’ve come to expect from a heavy TV investment and great TV creative. We smashed previous records for effectiveness in broadcast activity.
Mediacom estimate that to achieve the same impact, reach and frequency in TV over the same period of time (with the same number of assets to tell our story), we’d need to spend 40x the budget of the campaign on Facebook.