Jaguar Tries Sponsored Stories on Facebook

Facebook launched the ability for brands to sponsor posts and this morning I caught one example from Jaguar who decided to shine some attention on a recent Forbes magazine review of its Jaguar XJL.

The ad shows up as a "Sponsored Story" from Interactive Jaguar, which is the Facebook fan page for the Jaguar brand. When you click the story you are brought to the Forbes website to read the review.

In a bit of media buying hilarity the Forbes article that Jaguar is sponsoring on Facebook is being heavily sponsored by Hyundai and BMW with the two competitors (well I guess only one is a direct competitor) advertising on the Forbes website. Fortunately the review is about Jaguar and does offer some great thoughts on the XJL for readers.

Toyota Avalon: Now That's Entertainment!

When the average age of your customer is 66 years old, you have to get a bit creative to get some youthfulness into your marketing. This month’s Car & Driver has a full-page ad for the Toyota Avalon. The ad features three very beautiful women looking like they are going to a 1940’s dance at Hollywood’s Brown Derby.

The ad copy is all about the “Spacious Life” showcasing how roomy the Avalon is. No pun intended, it’s definitely a big selling point for the Avalon and what better way to connect with the consumer than by appealing to their youth, even if it was over a half century ago. Besides, the ad even may capture the interest of those not part of the WWII generation since ads with beautiful women is sure to intrigue any audience (sadly, this is probably what caught my interest if I’m being honest.)

There is nothing wrong or particularly great about the ad. I just found it an interesting way to appeal to your consumption target using some subtle sexiness while hearkening back to the youth of the customer in a tasteful way while still communicating the benefits of the vehicle.

Experience Continues Online

I was more surprised by a launch site that carried the "Travel Avalon Class" message into a campaign website.

Feature content transitions look like something out of MGM's That's Entertainment films. Content rotates to different theatrical stages where features are demonstrated by a host who looks like Ray Liotta and his female product demonstration model. They banter about "the big city", "the big easy", "those are fabulous shoes" and "welcome to the land of stars." It's all a bit cliche but that's the point. This is an attempt to take one back to a time when life was simple and Avalon's customers were young.

It really is a nicely done site though the transition between features takes awhile due to the creative assets loading and I do wonder about the patience of site visitors; although, if they do spend some time with the content it really is effective at explaining some very complex feature benefits that most site probably have an issue getting across to older customers. The Bluetooth and Navigation demonstrations are particularly effective here. Hopefully site visitors will notice the small font of the lower navigation so they can Build & Price and learn more.

Take a look at the site as my words can hardly explain what is going on here: http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/minisite/avalon/

When Foreign Ads Anger Other Markets

I’m a regular reader of several automotive blogs and one of my favorites is Jalopnik, a more irreverent version of AutoBlog or as one recent Twitter user put it – the Top Gear of the web. So it was no surprise to see a recent post covering Suggestive Automotive Print Ads that featured a very controversial BMW ad from Greece.

The ad ran in the summer of 2008 and keeps popping up every few months, thus creating a lot of negative press for BMW’s marketing efforts with some fierce bloggers and readers saying they’ll never buy a BMW. Granted, most likely empty threats, but still it is not a well-received ad when viewed by, let’s call them, “grownups” and I’m not talking age.

It was an ad, ran only in Greece where the age of consent is 15 and in a country lacking our Puritanical values. Does that make it right? No, because now with everything so easily sharable across the web, everyone gets to see how you market your products. Even if you designed an ad to appeal to male buyers in a small niche market, now the whole world knows about it and that is why it is so important for global brands to see what is going on across their agencies and to consider the backlash some regionally developed ads may cause when shared beyond the intended audience.

Some bloggers, who fail to research which sites are manufacturer ones and which ones are not, have generated some additional confusion about the ad.

Blogger Yvonne DiVita writes, “even the comments on the BMW site are divided...with too many men (at least I think they're men) making the kind of lewd, insulting remarks you would expect."

The sad thing is that the “comments on the BMW site” are not on a BMW site, they are from Ads of the World’s website which has no association with BMW (note: ad has been removed from the Ads of the World site.) The site aggregates ads from every country and the comments are probably from a bunch of random marketing people who frequent the site, not BMW owners (though some may be?)

BMW has not responded to any of this from what I could gather on search or looking through press releases on various BMW sites including the corporate BMW Group news area.

It’s been almost a year since the ad appeared in Greece and it is still showing up whenever someone wants to discuss sexism in automotive advertising. It was a concept done in poor taste, regardless of cultural mores. It also raises the importance of corporate review of international ads and how messages can affect brand perception in other countries since content sharing is so easy in the Internet age.

Yet it has had little to no affect on BMW sales, so maybe all of this doesn't really matter as we hear today that BMW is to overtake Lexus as the best selling luxury brand in the United States.