Two weeks before Super Bowl XLVIII, we could preview "teasers" - if not full versions - of commercials from companies like TurboTax, Axe, Squarespace, and, of course, Budweiser. We could see Nestle unveil their new Butterfinger peanut butter cup. Yet late blooming prevails among the ads that typically dominate post Super Bowl top-ten lists: car commercials. At $7 - 8M a minute, Super Bowl ad slots sold out two months in advance, and we knew that Audi, Volkswagen, Chevrolet, Hyundai, Kia, and Toyota had all purchased time.
Chevrolet, with 12 new vehicle releases between 2013 and 2014 to tout, bought a full two minutes. And yet the company has put out very little about how it might maximize this $12 - 15M investment. Where are the teasers?
Numbering show that in the run-up to the Super Bowl, commercials will attract 40 percent or more of their total lifetime YouTube views. So there's no time to waste. But coming into the home stretch, automobile spokespersons sound as proprietary as Google with a new algorithm. The ad glimpses they reveal are rumors of stars and models of cars, rough descriptions and isolated images. For instance, Kia will unveil a Matrix spoof in one of their spots.
Perhaps the car companies are shy about coming up against their past successes. For instance, Volkswagen will have trouble topping "The Force" (2011), an ad around a little Darth Vader.
More likely, the delay in auto industry ads attests to the convoluted and sophisticated tactics campaigns are leveraging these days to build suspense. In the next few days they'll be rolling in; Toyota released one as this article was being written.
Just over the past day or two, Volkswagen began to launch a series on their Youtube channel that at first seemed like something in the middle of A/B testing. Spoofing (and capitalizing on) all the elements of past Super Bowl hits (chimps, trained dogs, food porn, crashing structures, sexy women) Volkswagen had their cake and ate it too, dropping a mediocre ad that intimated, "See how we are engineering our commercial." Temptingly, they asked for feedback. And soon the site was uploading new, supposedly improved, versions of the commercial with text suggesting that each may or may not be the ad that runs on Super Bowl Sunday. And so the suspense begins.
Jaguar, the first car company to jump into the "teaser" stream, boldly admitted they were going to milk the suspense in rolling out their first-ever Super Bowl commercial. They blasted three teasers to the web early on, accompanied by a full-blown campaign called "Good to be Bad." With two in-house ad divisions, Jaguar makes no bones about how heavily it counts on ads to spur sales.
But they are not alone. As Super Bowl Sunday draws near, dealerships all over the country are anticipating, and the agencies creating car ads can't help but feel the weight of a whole lot at stake. Though 2014 sales projections for the industry are bright, a good deal of old inventory continues to languish on car lots, and at the dealer level this is still a problem.
As the teaser's Volkswagen engineer bumbles his way towards the perfect commercial algorithm, he could use some of the Force with him. It's been a rough year for Volkswagen, according to International Business Times,
Like the rest of the Volkswagen Group, salesman of the year Dale Argo at Hallmark Volkswagen in Tennessee is eager to get to the juicy sales growth projected for Volkswagen in 2014. It's not that a commercial instantly brings people in the door, Argo says, but it makes a connection. The "emotional charge" before and during the Super Bowl can amplify a good ad and help it connect, and from there, all it takes is humor for an ad that will be remembered. "The Force," Argo recalls, "tied the culture to a VW for a short while." And that's what it's all about.
Mark Strong in Jaguar's "Rendezvous"
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