Volvo signs 2-year Sky Atlantic sponsorship deal

Volvo has signed a deal with Sky Atlantic that will see it sponsor every programme on the channel for the next two years in a deal worth £5.3m as it looks to drive perceptions of Volvo as a designer of “quality” cars.

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Volvo is sponsoring Sky Atlantic in a 2-year deal

The sponsorship, which starts on 1 January, will mean that the car brand appears on Sky Atlantic for 60 seconds every hour. That includes two 15-second idents at the top and end of every hour-long programme, as well as 10 different 5-second idents leading into and out of the ad breaks.

The sponsorship will bring the Volvo brand to Sky Atlantic’s 3.2 million viewers a week, according to the latest Barb figures. Altogether, 10.4 million households have access to Sky Atlantic, which broadcasts TV programmes such as Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire and is part of the basic package for Sky TV subscribers.

Georgina Williams, Volvo Car UK’s head of marketing communications, says the deal is delivering a campaign with “targeted reach” and “consistent frequency”. She adds that Sky Atlantic viewers are very similar to Volvo’s target market, offering an opportunity to reach that audience regularly.

She adds: “This partnership with Sky’s premium channel, which is continuing to grow in content and viewers, allows us to regularly and consistently communicate with an audience that indexes highly against our target market, allowing us to build the brand story over two years.

“With this activity we are continually pushing both the brand and product message, giving us the longevity a six-week burst would simply not be able to create. Equally, it allows us both to present synergies when it comes to quality production values.”

In the first half of the year, the spots will focus on Volvo’s V40 Cross Country and XC60 R-Design models, with Volvo considering launching new creative for the second half of the year. Volvo aims to keep the idents “relevant and engaging” by relating features of a car to jobs within the film and TV industry.

They start with an image of a car, which then “explodes” to reveal the sum of its parts hanging in mid air. They will then look at different aspects of the car, for example relating a director to the steering wheel column, the sat nav to the location manager and passenger mirror to the hair and make-up team.

The final ident of the hour will show the car coming back together and the strapline “A quality production is made up of many parts”.

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