Car Ads - How To Make Them Good
Posted on April 7, 2008 - Filed Under ideaDRUNK's ideas
This weekend I was at a Toronto Blue Jay’s game and my friends Chris and Hamid asked me an interesting question – why do all car ads suck? If you’re watching an hour of television, you’ll probably be exposed to over 20 automobile ads from five or six different brands. Unfortunately for the car companies, you’d be lucky to remember one of the ads. Chances are that you would even get the brand confused with another.
There are two reasons that the majority of car ads suck - (1) they don’t break through the clutter, and (2) they try to say too much in too little space.
1. Breaking Through
When I was watching TV this weekend, every car ad was the same. Car driving. People in moderately funny situation. Punch line. Information about their features/financing. Car driving again. It seems as though there is a standard “formula” for how a car ad should be. But if you want to stand out and have people pay attention to your ad, you have to give them a reason to watch. Be interesting. Be different. Be brave.
BMW did an excellent job of this with their BMW films. Instead of spending their 2001 ad budget on normal ads and buying typical TV commercial space, they made a handful of short films and put them online. The films don’t have the typical driving-on-a-country-road scenes. They entertain. They make BMW look cool. They make me feel as though I could be James Bond if I drove a BMW.
For 10 minutes of awesomeness, watch this video:
2. A Clean Message
If text is on screen for two seconds in an ad, it shouldn’t be more than 8 words. But if you take a look at the end of some car ads, they have closer to 50 or 60 words on screen! It is humanly impossible to read that volume of text in that amount of time, much less remember it. Car companies will try to feature their new sunroof, sound system, financing options, JD Power ranking and safety ratings all in the same :30 second spot. With all that information, who can possibly remember what car is being sold?
If someone is seriously into buying a car, they will go online and research all of that information. The point of TV ads is to make people to want to buy your car. Having an extra cup-holder or 3.5% APR financing won’t make people say “Holy crap, I should check out that new Chevrolet Malibu.” You need to make it appealing with ONE simple message. Then, when people are interested, you make the rest of the information (financing, features, safety) readily available to them, so they can compare cars.
I’m learning how to play golf, and it’s the same. If I’m told to focus on change one part of my swing, it’s cool. If I’m told to think about 9 different part of my swing all at the same time, I do everything wrong. A clean message means that your audience will take away the single most important point. If you bombard people with multiple messages, you have no idea which ones they are going to remember.
I hope this answers your question guys.
- Christian
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3 Responses to “Car Ads - How To Make Them Good”
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I agree with the point of being simple and concise. Really, who cares about JD power ratings or awards it seems that these days every car has some sort of an award.
I also think they should star with building good cars. How many times you see a car in a commercial that looks really really good and then you come the dealership and find an average car with cheap plastic inside. This makes you not trust the commercial next time you see it.
Roman,
I agree with your insight. If the product sucks, than it doesn’t matter what the marketing does. Maybe the new phase of marketing is diving deeper into product development and using the consumer insights to make sure that we make stuff that people actually want.
I have always found impact with car ads is with offer, urgency and consistancy.. local dealerships suck at that and I believe that is the type of ad you are refering. Do you know any sales managers at car dealership? Chances are this is one WIRED, intense person.. and that is what they think works.. flash, bang, boom!
and the dealership will have the final say in production. Agencies and advertising acount reps will just say “Yes sir that will work” “here’s my invoice”