Irish car advertisers will spend up to €30 million this year trying to persuade drivers to switch brands. With so much money being spent on so many brands, old and new, the big quest for advertisers is trying to find something to say that's genuinely, or even apparently, different. Hugh Oram reports.
In the US, DaimlerChrysler is spending almost as much as the entire 2003 Irish car advertising spend on using Celine Dion to boost sliding Chrysler sales.
According to figures from Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI), the organisation that represents most major ad agencies, just over half the spend on car advertising went into newspapers last year. Television was way behind at 18 per cent, followed by outdoor advertising at 14 per cent and radio at 12 per cent.
Spending on interactive car advertising remains tiny, the same as cinema advertising for cars, about €400,000 last year, according to Shenda Loughnane of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and managing director of Ican, an interactive ad agency. "Spending by car brands is growing strongly," she says, "but not as much as for other categories of interactive advertising."
With so much competition among established brands and new entrants, trying to come up with new ideas to woo consumers is the most difficult challenge. Few have been able to replicate the unique appeal of the Toyota press campaigns of nearly 30 years ago, which used bilingual ads to catch consumers' attention. One memorable slogan of the time was: "Toyota - the Irish word for reliability".
Cost pressures also make the task difficult. Ford, the biggest selling make here, is cutting its marketing budget internationally by 20 per cent over the next two years. Declan Foley is brand manager for small and medium-sized Ford cars in Ireland. He explains their two-tier approach. Firstly, there's the overall brand approach. Then there's localised advertising under banners from local dealers. Themes are down to earth, such as "get more out of it" for the Fiesta, and "gets you to a better view" for the Fusion, while for the Focus it's the car's sheer dependability.
With Volkswagen, the personality of the brand is all-important. Mark Hogan, director of the Owens DDB agency, says: "Our Volkswagen advertising is typically Volkswagen, with varying degrees of humour, quirkiness, cleverness or interesting visuals, headlines or perspectives. This results in interest, relevant and most importantly, effective advertising."
At MG Rover Ireland, the spend on advertising this year will be about €1.5 million. MG Rover has also been using such advertising hooks as zero per cent APR finance and "a night out with a super model".
This suggests a throwback to the bad old days of car advertising, when most makers thought the best way to sell cars was to drape a real life model on the bonnet.
Sarah Hayes, marketing manager of Hyundai cars in Ireland, acknowledges the problems of stimulating consumer interest in a younger brand such as Hyundai. "The big car brands still tend to dominate by sheer on-road presence and the weight of their cumulative brand advertising and heritage," she says. "Smaller and younger brands have to be more creative to try and break into this 'Golden Circle'."
Campaigns, like car styles, have become very generic: "Not surprisingly, consumers have difficulty attributing brands to specific commercials." For Hyundai, the key is humour.
Hyundai's current campaign has the underlying aim of promoting the product range - and she claims success: "Hyundai's current market share is up by 24.3 per cent, while the overall car market is down 2 per cent."
In the US, because of the colossal size of the market, car advertising uses mega-buck campaigns to awe consumers through sheer scale and volume. The new three-year link-up between Chrysler and Celine Dion is netting the Canadian singer many millions of dollars.
Naturally, Chrysler won't say exactly how much, but the deal, on an annualised basis, is estimated to be worth close to the entire Irish car advertising spend for this year. It involves all sorts of cross-promotion between singer and brand, and Dion is even getting to sing a special Chrysler song. The big, unanswered question is whether spending so much money on Celine Dion can actually help revive a flagging brand.
Here in Ireland many car advertisers try to contain advertising costs by using pan-European campaigns. The end result can be bland and forgettable.
However, one strong advocate of such campaigns is Mike Keely, account director for Fiat and Alfa Romeo at the QMP D'Arcy agency in Dublin. "We use highly creative pan-European campaigns adjusted to our local market needs," he says. "This gives us the best benefits for our brand campaigns. We act on the maxim 'think global, act local'."
With Ford, the main brand campaigns are pan-European. Most of the creative work is done in London, but there is some local adaptation. "When you're doing advertising campaigns for 22 markets in Europe, it's more cost-effective to use the pan-European approach," explains Declan Foley of Ford Ireland.
The creative work for dealer-related advertising is done locally. While so much car advertising used here hasn't been created locally, some brands and agencies make a virtue of local creative work. For the current Hyundai campaign, all the work was developed and shot in Ireland, using Irish crew and actors. Its agency, McConnells, is the largest in Ireland and one of the few big ones still Irish-owned.
This year, as car advertisers desperately try to find a new twist that will hold consumers, a new interactive device is likely to come into use here. Shenda Loughnane of the Interactive Advertising Bureau says that elsewhere in Europe, car manufacturers are using footage from their TV commercials in their interactive campaigns, bridging the gap between TVs and PCs.
"Car firms need to spend more time seeing how to use interactive advertising," says Loughnane. "Nobody's going to buy a car online, but interactive has lots of potential for awareness building."
Perhaps interactive will be the way to create new advertising campaigns that will mirror the stand-out effectiveness of those old Toyota ads. These days, with the clutter of so many competing yet bland and boring car advertising campaigns, the real Holy Grail is originality.