Saturday 2 August 2008

The car breakdown...

Car ads, possibly the best sector in advertising.

Mercedes: Beautiful and thought provoking

Audi: smooth, well made and functional

BMW: strong, hard selling and fact based

Honda: Its Honda, need I say more?

Yes these brands get beautiful ads but the automotive sector has one major flaw... The small car.

The last great small car campaign I can remember is Renault Clio's Nicole and Papa.
(Bringing Theirry Henry into the mix just makes me think football not cars.)

You could say that VW's golf has good ads, but the price and size has kinda pulled it out of that area now, polo/fox/lupo yes, golf no.

Smart car constantly bangs on about how small it is, actually come to think of it all small cars only play on that point. There must be something else other than "I'm small" but it doesn't matter how many new "small" cars come out the advertising is rather... uninspiring.

Example: The suzuki swift: Really really bad advertising in my opinion, which got mildly better when they added wall.e to it (but im an animation freak so that doesn't really count), however I still want one. The advertising has done nothing for me but the reviews of the cars performance have. How can all this great stuff in a small package lead to such bland advertising?

We've tried to make small car ads, its hard. Really hard. We understand how difficult it is.

Its probably going to end up as one of my aims in life: make a good small car ad.

Surprisingly the only people recently who have done everything right with small (ish) cars is Skoda. If you had asked me which brand could put out a good small car ad it wouldn't have been them, obviously its going to be hard to follow but it reinvented the brand and sales have gone through the roof.

Whats even more surprising is that it hasn't translated into the larger end, the Octavia and Superb. My family are a fan of the new Skoda's and I can tell you they're damn good cars. (Bought before "favourite things" so not a product of the advertising.)

Im ranting, and to be honest I'm not quite sure what my point (except the fact that I really want a car at the moment) is but I suppose the first line said it all.

Car ads, possibly the best sector in advertising.

2 comments:

RachelC said...

So what do you think about Mini advertising?

Rachel said...

I think Mini isn't very mini anymore!

I love the digital aspect of mini advertising but the TV hasn't inspired me much.

The car has kinda gone the way of the golf, a little too big and a little too expensive for small car status.

Small cars these days are smart, C1, aygo and 201 sort of size, the cars are getting smaller!