BMW Spreads Its Olympic Joy, Audi Tries Squashing It

BMW is marketing its largest ever brand awareness campaign during this year’s Winter Olympics. The “Story of Joy” campaign is built off the early foundation first started with the launch of the BMW Z4 campaign.

The ads focus on new products, drivers and one TV spot showcases the compelling BMW Vision EfficientDynamics concept car that debuted last August at the Frankfurt Auto Show. From BMW’s Press Release about the campaign, “Story of Joy” introduces a new creative aesthetic characterized by strong, colorful images often conveying people and their experiences with the subtlest of references to BMW products.”

Brand messages encompass everything from emotional responses about the product line making drivers feel youthful and inspired. The campaign also dips heavily into BMW’s heritage of driver events. It’s the second time in the past two years BMW has highlighted the Southern California Bimmerfest event, which is one of the largest gathering of BMW owners and fans. The last time was in a spot for the last 3-series sedan.

Audi Begins Its Latest Brand Campaign Too

The new brand campaign comes at a time when BMW’s most aggressive competitor Audi is launching its own brand campaign mocking BMW for falling behind Audi in “three straight Car & Driver comparisons.” The Audi spot is entertaining, but the BMW brand ads appeal to those who are advocates and satisfied owners of BMW products.

Showing images of happy owners, enjoying their vehicles is nice feel good marketing, but is it effective? This is a difficult question to answer and depends on what BMW is trying to gain from the spots; sales of course, but I’m sure some positive brand awareness is in the mix of campaign goals too.

The issue is that the ads are forgettable and barely interesting enough to share from a brand enthusiast perspective. Unlike the 3-Series ad from 2008 that brought together a strong emotive response from many BMW brand advocates and fans, the new Olympic spots fall flat giving people little reason to talk about the ads or promote them to their social network.

The Audi ads have a more interesting message; though, I’m personally not much of a fan of mentioning your top competitor in your marketing, since you’re just giving your key competitor free advertising. That said the Audi ads are at least memorable and interesting enough to share. They're definitely not forgettable.

The BMW Joy campaign is pleasant and aligns well with an Olympic games feel good message. It’s just that the ads will probably be lost in the marketing clutter.

BMW Olympic Ads:





BMW's 2008 Summer Olympic Games 3-Series Ad:



Audi's Brand Ads:

Lexus Pops Its Top

Lexus wants you to “Open It Up” according to their Facebook ad for the launch of the 2010 Lexus IS Convertible. I’m guessing they couldn’t go with “Pop Your Top”, so they found a nice PG-version of the phrase to get people excited about another hardtop folding roof from a luxury manufacturer.

The CRM email piece is a little more understated as it just asks be "Open All Night". Oh wait, that sounds a bit odd too. Regardless of when you open it all up, the new Lexus IS Convertible has arrived.

The email campaign started yesterday and ads for the car appeared on Facebook today. Links from the ads, take you to the Lexus Future Vehicles section. Here there is a limited palette of colors to choose from, four to be exact. A couple videos show some nice beauty shots of the top retracting complete with spa-like music soundtrack. Lastly, a surprise, or at least it was for me, the new convertible is offering a F-Sport package that upgrades the car with many performance features including cross-drilled brakes, performance intake, sway bars and many other enthusiast goodies.

I have to admit, I was taken aback by the F-Sport options. It is obviously Lexus’ answer to the new BMW Performance line that the Bavarians are promoting lately. The package does add an element to the Lexus convertible I was surprised to see Lexus pursue.

The IS is a rather sedate, boring car. I drove a IS350 all-wheel drive for a couple days last year after bringing in my wife’s RX300 for some service at the dealership. The loaner IS I had was nice, but it was typical Lexus. Great materials, decent handling, and a peppy engine, but nothing I’d call out as performance. Sure there is the IS-F M3 fighter, but that seems like a much different beast than the standard issue IS.

The IS convertible just doesn’t strike me as an enthusiast car for Lexus as I’m sure we’ll see tons of real estate agents, scratch that they’re broke, uhm… female doctors driving around in this car. The enthusiast culture of BMW owners is hard enough on us convertible owners (I drive a 2007 BMW 335i convertible), I can’t imagine how unconvincing a F-Sport IS convertible is to the performance crowd. So, it is an interesting product decision and it will be interesting to see if and how Lexus markets the IS beyond the top popping crowd.

I find it odd that they are now heavily promoting this car and still lack a Build & Price feature to configure the vehicle on their website. Plus, driving customers to their Future/Concept website section gives the impression the car is some way off in the future and there is no communication about when to expect the Lexus IS convertible at dealerships.

After some searching, the Lexus IS convertible will enter showrooms in late May and start at $38,490. So, keep your top on until then...