Top 10 Automotive Social Video Campaigns Of 2011
Steve Davies
We hear a lot about Intelligence in the motoring industry. It's become the norm in automotive acronyms, especially for the leading German car makers - Intelligent Performance, Intelligent Lightweight Construction and even Intelligent Emotion (whatever that means!) - but how intelligent is their marketing?
Rather than base our Top 10 listing purely on video views and social shares, I thought it would be interesting to look a little closer at how well each campaign contributed to the 'equity' of each brand - the assets a brand is then able to use across its entire marketing mix.
In today's highly-networked business environment, the old adage "what get's measured, gets done" is becoming something of a liability, as marketing teams seek to justify their actions through quantitative analysis and attribution modelling, while often ignoring the factors which drive those results.
When something can't be measured, does that make it not worth doing? Of course not. But in the rapidly evolving digital environment, that's precisely what happens.
We struggle to keep up with all the tools, platforms and new methods, far less accurately measure them, so just like performance, lightweight construction or efficiency, automotive marketers sometimes need the intelligence to realise where taking the right action is equally as important as being able to justify it thereafter.
Ultimately, intelligence boils down to using the assets at your disposal in the most effective ways to achieve your objectives. Let's see how well they did:
Top 10 Most Shared Automotive Ads of 2011 (not all released in 2011)
- Volkswagen: The Force: Volkswagen Commercial - 47.5 million views, 4,813,984 shares (32,618 comments)
- DC Shoes: Ken Block's Gymkhana Four; The Hollywood Megamercial - 13.1 million views, 2,111,150 shares (19,115 comments)
- Kia: Party Rock Anthem-Kia Soul Hamster Commercial - 10.7 million views, 1,556,221 shares (12,748 comments)
- Nissan: Pôneis Malditos - 13.9 million views, 968,124 shares (25,827 comments)
- DC Shoes: Ken Block's Gymkhana Three; The Ultimate Playground - 733,112 shares
- Chrysler Eminem Super Bowl Commercial - Imported From Detroit - 15.4 million views, 436,016 shares (28,241 comments)
- BMW 1M - Walls - MPowered Performance Part 1 - 3.0 million views, 407,505 shares (1,922 comments)
- DC Shoes: Ken Block's Gymkhana Two; The Infomercial - 341,980 shares
- Team Hot Wheels - The Yellow Driver's World Record Jump - 8.1 million views, 294,046 shares (4,177 comments)
- Volkswagen: Black Beetle - 6.3 million views, 212,290 shares (2,371 comments)
I could wax lyrical about the high-quality production values in our Top 10, their clever use of aspirational memes and how effective they are in conveying the personality of the brands they represent, but there's an elephant in the room.
Nissan Brazil's ad for the Frontier pickup, Pôneis Malditos, is not like other video ads. According to Portuguese Blog the ad uses a play on words 'do you have horse-power or ponies?' A song then taunts the presumably-macho target customer with a chorus line that I'll leave you to translate for yourself, 'pônei maldito, pônei maldito', since it's definitely NSFW.
There’s a twist at the end, where the cute little pony tells you not to close the video, followed by its evil twin who tells you that if you don’t share the video with 10 people, you’ll get the pony’s song stuck in your head forever.
So it is basically the advertising equivalent of chain-mail spam. Such questionable tactics are unlikely to succeed more than once, so we'll treat it as an anomaly in our 2011 list.
The remaining ads in our Top 10 illustrate the trend towards creating re-usable memes, enabling their brands to reuse the characters and storylines in other media campaigns and thereby reinforce the identity to which customers establish a relationship with. In last week's interview with Ken Block of DC Shoes, he spoke about the value of building 'personality' into a viral video and we can see this type of character-based ad dominating the charts.
If you're anything like me, then you'll not be satisfied with a Top 10 list of the most shared social media ads, you'll want to know which car maker has really grasped the nettle and made social video a mainstay in their marketing plans. If you'd like to drill a little deeper, then head on over to SkiddMark and read an extended version of this article including the Top 5 Automotive Brands of 2011.
Reader Comments (1)
One consequence of these attributes is that successful video ads are no longer cut down versions of their TV counterparts, but instead bespoke short films lasting anywhere between 2 and 9 minutes – the feature ad. The sales message, if there is one, is firmly hidden away and replaced by entertaining content and a viewing experience that encourages sharing and social conversation.