Motor ads need to make their marque

The latest controversy on TV airtime sales, between Carlton and Laser, over car advertisers (MW December 6) raises new issues about the way airtime is bought and sold, and the purpose and effectiveness of car TV advertising.

Last week Carlton Sales was accused of winning big slices of ad budgets away from rival sales house Laser, and straining its ability to deliver commercial audiences to car advertisers in London next year.

Peugeot-Citroë, handled by Mediapolis, is understood to have switched its entire London region ad spend of 10m away from LWT to Carlton. An estimated 90 per cent of the budget was previously with LWT. Bob Offen, Mediapolis chief executive, declined to comment on the Peugeot account.

Meanwhile, The Media Centre is believed to be switching client funds, including Fiat, towards London weekday ad slots.

Insiders at Laser claim the exclusivity demanded by car advertisers in ad breaks may give Carlton trouble accommodating the volume of car advertising it has committed itself to.

“You can’t have Vauxhall, Ford, Citroë and Fiat running four days a week on Carlton without running out of quality airtime,” says a Laser insider.

Such a fracas between airtime oligopolists makes trading in TV advertising look as if it is stuck in a time-warp, not in the midst of a multichannel revolution, where car advertisers are able to pick and choose media more freely.

This year car advertisers will have spent more than 500m by the end of December on TV advertising. In the past five years, their spend has increased more than 50 per cent from 331.9m a year (Register-MEAL).

At the same time, new media opportunities have grown enormously. Not only are there more TV channels than ever before, offering new advertising and sponsorship opportunities, but regional radio channels, new magazines and a vast increase in newspaper coverage of cars has created more advertising environments.

Many believe that car advertisers are some of the worst offenders when it comes to unimaginative volume buying. This is partly due to a market imperative – if everyone else is spending so much money on TV ads, shouldn’t we? But media buying for car companies is arguably as unimaginative as the creative work that goes with it.

Mediapolis conducted research at the recent Marketing Week conference on motor industry advertising which summed up the problem for manufacturers. The research included a “brand recognition survey” of the audience which involved both advertising agencies and clients, but even with such an ad-literate audience the results illustrated confusion.

Phil Danter and Russell Boyman, respective planning and broadcast directors of Mediapolis, tested the audience with five clips of TV ads and five press executions – all overt branding was removed. They asked the audience to identify both marque and model in each case.

TV significantly outscored press on marque recognition with 56 per cent recognising TV and only 22 per cent recognising press. The conversion to model attribution was even more illuminating, with 75 per cent for TV but only ten per cent for press.

Particularly surprising is that only two per cent of delegates identified the correct model in the press ads. Danter says: “Given that the press is used predominately by motor manufacturers, for tactical, model-specific messages, this is a worrying statistic. One wonders how low attribution must be among consumers.”

But the fact that car advertising has a problem with exclusivity is significant. The research showed that the creative treatment was as significant as the medium for brand recognition.

Mediapolis’ own clients, Citroë and Peugeot, were excluded when the individual marques were tested.

With TV ads, VW Golf achieved the highest marque recognition, with 48 per cent for the “UFO” execution which does not actually feature the car. Despite this, the conversion to model attribution was 79 per cent.

By contrast, the Volvo S40 “Alumination” commercial featured the car heavily yet had the lowest marque score – 39 per cent – and the worst conversion to model recognition.

This, admittedly limited, survey indicates that the most memorable TV advertising is that which avoids straightforward parading of the cars; the less visible the car, the better the marque and model recognition.

This, of course, is a trend which many ad agencies are now following. Ford’s launch ad for the Ka makes scant visual reference to the vehicle. However, the vast majority of press advertising is dominated by shots of models, which, says Danter, has much the same effect as wallpaper.

Ironically, the press research showed that Daewoo was the clear winner. The “Mould” execution achieved 73 per cent recognition, the next best, Rover 400, attaining a mere 13 per cent.

“It certainly made me question the role of the press in attaining brand status for this sector,” says Danter. “Only really distinctive executions in the press stand any chance of being truly memorable. Even their clients are forgetting them pretty quickly, it would seem.”

While the debate rages over the switch between weekend and weekday London audiences, ad agencies and clients should perhaps reflect more on the reasons why they cannot share ad breaks with rivals. The fact is that car ads look too similar. If there were more imaginative creative treatments, exclusivity might not be such a big issue.