Top Picks: Best 2013 Car Commercials and Advertising

Strident opinions by Steven Bochenek

Ninety-eight percent of advertising is tedious dreck you’ve learned to tune out. Another one percent is interesting or entertaining but irrelevant. “Remember, like, that guy did that sooo funny thing? Wha’ were they selling again?” Yes, those ads. If you don’t remember the brand and product benefit, that’s bad advertising.

Even more loathsome than bad advertising is advertising award shows, where fragile egos are shattered or barely held together with Botox, booze and barbiturates.

Yet when a brilliant piece of communications sneaks through and connects with its intended audience, it’s simply magical. And there’s nothing wrong with celebrating that.

So – here are ten advertising examples that got it right since early 2012. The first five (Okay six, because Autos.ca loves you) are simply TV commercials because they’re easy to talk about and we all need stuff to post on Facebook. The second batch? We’ll get to that.

Several are from the Super Bowl because that’s the only time anyone watches TV anymore. Enjoy.

Honourable Mention (Six): Volkswagen Beetle ‘Get Happy’ For Branding

Many experts credit Volkswagen and its ‘60s NYC agency, DDB (the same one they still use in many parts of the world today) with inventing modern advertising. Headlines that would still get most agencies fired today – like ‘Lemon’ and ‘No point in showing you the 1962 Volkswagen, it still looks the same’ – were that much more incendiary fifty years ago. What brave clients to trust the agency to make their brand legendary.

This spot began with an interesting conundrum: it wasn’t trying to define any special niche or explain a specific product benefit, just feel good about Beetles. Which actually makes the brief much tougher than you’d think. But you can’t picture any other car in this context – excellent branding. And who doesn’t love the Partridge Family?

Five: Chevrolet Silverado ‘Apocalypse’ For Topicality and SFX

Advertisers are always trying to be newsworthy and relevant. One of the best ways is to react fast to what’s in the news. The all-time best example was also at this year’s Super Bowl when Oreo informed those in the blacked out dome but also on Twitter that they can still dunk in the dark!

This General Motors spot used the much-hyped Mayan meltdown to make the point that Chevy Silverado is built to last. It’s funny and simple to get without being simple-minded and charmingly post-Apocalyptic. Enjoy the invincible Twinkies and raining frogs. Speaking of the world’s end, who doesn’t love Barry Manilow?

Four: Hyundai Genesis ‘Excited’ For Judicious Use of Budget

Many won’t agree with this choice, but they can write their own list. My favourite advertising is clever hard-sell done inventively on the cheap.

The sheer reality of what this spot’s creators were facing is clear. Dollars to dollars to donuts, they were using existing footage of the car at a track: stuff that manufacturers supply their agencies around the world for retail ads. Conclusion? There probably wasn’t the time/money to shoot something original.

Plus there was the laundry list of points the client clearly wanted the ad to make. (Rule #1 of effective advertising is to champion a single benefit with panache, but this is one of those times clients remind creative people, not vice versa, that rules are made to be broken.)

Solution? If you can’t change the pictures, play with the sound. They flipped the voiceover from the expected cool gravelly FM guy you’ve heard ten times today to the excited car geek who’s experiencing 429 hp!

For budget and time-effectiveness it’s very smart. You could execute the whole thing overnight. Generate the title cards in 10 minutes, record the track in an hour, slap them all together into the edit, exacerbating the contrast of the car’s motion and title cards stillness with peak revs and silence. Would you watch this for sheer entertainment or pass this on? Maybe not. Would you watch it if you were looking for a powerful sedan? Definitely! Hence, effective advertising.

Three: Kia Sorento ‘Space Babies’ For Targeting and Production

Here’s the inverse of the above. Occasionally a creative team is blessed with a decent budget – the words ‘Super Bowl’ have been known to spontaneously generate zeroes – and the go-ahead to entertain. But any idiot with money can produce pretty pictures and slick production.

What’s so right about this spot is how well they nail the demographic, parents (but really mothers) with a charming story: an age-old dilemma all parents face and can relate to. The fantasy-world the SFX people create is worthy of Peter Jackson’s Lovely Bones. Extra credits for repeatability: you can see the big joke coming from afar but the creators jammed the spot with details. So you can enjoy it over and again.

Two: Honda CR-V ‘Matthew’s Day Off’ For Targeting and Audacious Use of Budget

It’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off shilling for Honda. But it’s really much more. Expensive as this must have been, it’s ingeniously targeted. The generation who grew up in the shadow of the baby boom are going grey, getting sore backs and miss those carefree days of Reaganomics and alligator shirts. Now that they have adult responsibilities and must purchase a ride to fit their own little Jeanies and Ferrises (Ferri?), hit them hard with nostalgia.

One: Cadillac ATS Launch Campaign For Being Smart Versus ‘Clever’

Forgive me for adding this car and brand, once again, to one of my lists but this was the only car campaign from last year that I actually watched on TV (versus viewing friends’ suggestions on the internet). The creative strategy’s brilliant: prove the ATS’s world-class engineering by testing it in the world’s most challenging conditions. This film is an amalgam of several spots, but encapsulates the campaign well.

But modern TV only matters on game day! What of the 364 others?

Social media has wasted plenty of people’s time over the past decade, but it’s laid waste to the media industry. Meaning? Why should clients pay the Super Bowl’s exorbitant media rates (or any others) these days when you’re happy to pin, post or tweet their message for them? Rather than blocking out marketing, many of us have become inadvertent broadcasters. (Please ‘Like’ this on Google+.)

These final five choices are big ideas encompassing complete campaigns exploiting social media. Any TV is subservient to the larger message.

Interesting word that, campaigns. Marketing is littered with militarisms: target, strategy, tactics, et cetera. These are as brilliantly mapped out and executed as the blitzkrieg of Poland, if slightly more moral. If you find programs like CBC’s Age of Persuasion interesting, you’ll love these case studies.

Five: VW Polowers, Spain

The Polo is a tiny European model that Volkswagen Spain believed wasn’t getting enough love in the social universe from young prospective buyers. So they created a campaign that could only exist on Twitter where this demographic lives. The concept: a virtual race. Each tweet advances the car to its goal. Participants could watch it in real-time on the promotional sitelet and see their profile pic become part of the track when they tweet. The last person to tweet when the virtual race finished would win the Polo.

They created a feeding frenzy. It became Spain’s biggest trend on Twitter that day, trumping the Biebs himself (mind, that was before Justin was driving shirtless into Polish airport security guards with President Harper awkwardly smiling alongside). Besides, who doesn’t love the Black Keys?

Four: VW Jetta GLI Art Heist, Canada

Volkswagen again? Sorry, but as mentioned above they’ve always done interesting work. And no, this isn’t here as a boobie prize because we need some Cancon. This brilliant campaign made noise all over the internet and world. The point? To show you could do something beautiful with the Jetta GLI.

Using slo-mo photography and the Jetta’s lights at night, they created beautiful designs: art, they say. Then they posted framed and signed originals at random spots around Canada’s biggest cities, hinted online where they were, and filmed people stealing them. Then they encouraged the thieves to ‘fess up, which they did.

The buzz was epic. Rather than hoping people would watch an ad between baseball game innings, VW got a million Facebook impressions and 2 million twitter impressions.

Three: Nissan Rumble, the Nordic Countries (Run Out of Finland)

If you’ve never been to Nordic Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland; speaking from a different language family, Finland is actually not Scandinavian) you’re probably not aware of the intense rivalry between these nations. To show off their crossovers to young urban types, Kia exploited these rivalries on Facebook and other soc-nets. Each nation supplied celebrities to race across the four countries. Racers had to stop whenever people stopped tweeting. It was bigger than Abba and Five Girls With Dragon Tattoos.

Over 2.8 million people sought out this campaign every day: a reversal of the advertising cliché ‘cutting through the clutter’, this literally was cluttering their attention.

Two: Toyota Prius Bike, USA

There’s a popular phrase in advertising regarding standing out: when everybody else zigs, you zag. So, how best to demonstrate green efficiency? How about an expensive TV spot with fawns gamboling through the forest while a happy white family watches from within their hybrid? Meh. It’s just that the intended audience doesn’t even watch TV.

Instead, Toyota’s agency made something utterly newsworthy. It’s a bicycle – not a car ad campaign – that features the same principles the Prius brand espouses. Example? You can change gears with your brain waves! Cool! Again, they got heaps news coverage, plus the audience themselves to talk about it, rather than paying for media placement.

One: Mercedes-Benz F CELL Invisible, Germany

M-B wanted to show off their fuel cell technology. Its emissions are zero and hence ‘invisible’ to the environment. So they covered the car with LEDs – creating a huge mobile monitor – and attached cameras to either side. While driving, each camera posted what it was seeing on the opposite side’s LEDs, effectively rendering it invisible. Brilliant. Then they drove it around Germany and got everybody else to talk about it.

It’s thinking like these campaigns that have me excited about the advertising industry again for the first time in over a decade.