Issue: The Audi Driving Experience shows the opportunities and challenges of building a brand experience
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

Your advertising blogger recently had the opportunity to attend the Audi Driving Experience at Sebring Raceway in Florida. The program is called an ‘advanced handling course’ and as such it falls somewhere between the teenage netherworld of driver’s ed and the high thrills, high dollar sport of amateur racing. The goal is to teach adults how cars handle in real-world situations and give them practical experience in recovering from ice-induced skids, sudden road obstacles and other road hazards. The program is run by experienced professional race car drivers; at Sebring it is a team led by Grand-Am Cup racer Nick Fanelli through Panoz Racing School. About a dozen adult males (and the adult daughter of one) turned out for the opportunity to drive Audi TT coupes around various configurations of cones and on a wet/dry skidpad with Nick Fanelli’s team.

The Audi Driving Experience is an enjoyable weekend for the participants, and a nice add-on to race car training for Fanelli and Panoz, but it is deadly serious business for Audi. It is a very rare chance for Audi to indoctrinate its most loyal customers in the brand and to turn them into brand advocates. As we all know, those consumers who are most passionate about a brand recommend it. These brand advocates (or brand evangelists) have a huge effect on long-term brand strength. In some brands, we can see over half of all new users being influenced by a brand advocate with a personal recommendation.

The Audi Driving Experience is a well-run program, but it misses huge opportunities to position and build the Audi brand with enthusiasts. The Audi marketing team seems to have little connection with the school and they did not turn the Audi Driving Experience into a step behind the velvet rope for the participants. Among the missed opportunities:

1. Brand Connection - There was good Audi signage and Audi vehicles as well as instructors who had tested other Audi products and spoke highly of them. However the school didn’t either sell or distribute Audi branded material (students seemed uniformly disappointed not even to be given a t-shirt or hat to commemorate their weekend). Beyond that, nobody from Audi USA corporate attended the event. This would be a golden opportunity for marketers to connect with the base and more importantly to give these consumers a sense of being included in the Audi family by discussing upcoming vehicles, challenges, etc. Instead the experience seemed very removed from the brand.
2. Sampling - The majority of the adults in this class were high-net worth individuals, many with a stable of cars. Given that, it was surprising that Audi only supplied the school with 2006 model Audi TTs, and none of the high-end Audis that the participants would be more likely to buy upon returning home. This obviously springs from a cost reduction focus (flogging a $70,000 A-8 or RS-4 on the skidpad is more expensive than a car costing half as much and makes maintenance trickier as well). On the other hand, Audi could have sold a few cars immediately (perhaps getting a return on the higher equipment and maintenance costs) and it certainly would have generated more enthusiasm with these brand faithful if they had let the students drive their premium products. BMW appears to understand the importance of high-end sampling as they routinely use M-5’s (one of their most exclusive cars) in their own driving school.
3. Relationship Building - Running a branded experience should be the beginning, not the end, of a relationship. While Panoz, the company running the training understood this, Audi did not. Ironically, at the end of the course students walked away with materials on other classes from Panoz but nothing from Audi.

All of this goes back to a theme that the ThirdWay Advertising Blog has been harping on for most of the past three years - execution. It’s not enough to have a good idea for your brand and to construct a decent strategic plan to execute it. You have to get the details right, all of them. The Audi Driving Experience is a great example of a brand getting the big idea right, but fumbling on the execution. While senior management can dismiss the impact of these programs because they reach relatively few consumers, the impact of these consumers can be significant. Just try Googling “Audi Driving Experience” in a week or so. You’ll likely find these words up near the top of the list, next to Audi’s.

Today the ThirdWay Advertising Blog announces our Awards for Most Effective Advertising for 2005. These are, in our judgement, the most effective single ads or campaigns running during 2005 (regardless of when they were produced). In the selection process this year we noticed a few trends. Here are five trends in effective advertising for 2005:

1. Few Celebrities - Only two of our top 10 picks employed celebrity spokespeople. For one of these (USA Networks) the celebrities were an integral part of the brand offering that was being advertised.
2. Small Budgets - The Most Effective Advertising for 2005 was not the most expensive. Fully half of our picks feature people talking directly to a camera. None involved elaborate production numbers or expensive stunts. A few involved visual effects, but only those where the effect reinforced the brand.
3. Not So Funny - Only three of our picks used humor. While we believe humor can be effective, it can distract if it doesn’t link back to the brand. Nothing is worse from the brand manager’s standpoint than a funny ad that everyone remembers selling a brand that nobody remembers.
4. Not Just “Buzz-Worthy” - Several of our picks for 2005 generated lots of Buzz. But for these brands, the Buzz reinforced the brand positioning. Buzz without the right connection to the brand is just static on the screen to brand marketers.
5. Old Brands Return - Four of our picks are for brands that have used these campaigns to stage a comeback in 2005. For all of these brands, the advertising campaign was central to the resurgence of the brand.

Commentary by: David
Issue: Best and Worst Campaigns of 2005 Named by WSJ

Susan Vranica and Brian Steinberg of the Wall Street Journal today named their picks for the best and worst advertising of 2005.

This Advertising Blog will announce the “ThirdWay Awards” - our picks for best spots and campaigns of 2005 as well as our choices for the year’s worst efforts on Monday, January 2^nd. In the meantime, however, we offer you a brief synopsis of the Wall Street Journal’s picks (read the original story here) along with our thoughts and links to our reviews of these spots.

The Best Advertising of 2005 –

1. Dove “Real Women” (Unilever)
• WSJ Rationale – Unilever broke new ground with this campaign which championed the cause of real women with real curves. The campaign created a public dialogue about our society’s sometimes unhealthy beauty ideal and generated a tremendous surge of media coverage for the ad.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ** (Click Here for our review)

While we agreed with the cause and applauded Unilever for supporting the Campaign for Real Beauty (the partner non-profit in these spots), we believed that Dove as a brand was not a good match for the real beauty message. Dove lotion is still a beauty product, intended to enhance a woman’s looks and ends up feeding the self-doubt the campaign seeks to end.

1. Target “New Yorker Issue” (Target Brands)
• WSJ Rationale – Buying out an entire issue of the New Yorker magazine and commissioning original artwork was “gutsy”, generating the kind of attention the retailer is looking for in a medium that has gotten short shrift from advertisers of late. Target showed how it and print can make a difference.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ***** (Click Here for our review)

With one masterstroke, Target sealed its ownership of “Design for All” – a bold step forward in its decade-long move away from Wal-Mart in the mass merchandiser retail sphere. In spite of these years of steady progress in bringing design to everyday life, Target seemed to arrive all at once last year and the New Yorker spread was the tipping point. Suddenly, Minneapolis and not Bentonville looks like the capital of the retailing world – as evidenced by the fact that Wal-Mart hired away a top marketer from Target and started running design-centric advertising (click here).

1. Budweiser “Superbowl Salute to the Troops” (Anheuser-Busch)
• WSJ Rationale – A smart turn to the right from the usually “sophomoric” Superbowl ads from the leading American beer-maker, this “poignant” spot featuring soldiers returning from overseas to spontaneous applause in an airport featured understated branding but a powerful message. Budweiser executes perfectly and scores a big win.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ****

We agree that this spot was perfectly executed. Anheuser-Busch precisely judged the mood of the country and was rewarded with generous press coverage and strong recall for the spot. This was a tactical move, no doubt, and doesn’t build the unique rationale for the brand but does connect to some of the core brand attributes for Budweiser. And most importantly it stood out against some of the cheesier executions in the all-important Superbowl ad war.

1. Nike “Tiger Woods Miracle Shot” (Nike)
• WSJ Rationale – When Tiger woods sunk an improbably chip shot and the ball hung for a second on the lip of the cup with the Nike swoosh featured prominently, it was a moment made for advertising. “With incidents like these, who needs to make actual ads?” says the Journal. They also applaud Wieden + Kennedy’s deft use of humor to set off the ad. The ad ran only briefly to avoid sounding too self-congratulatory.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ***

The actual event generated so much publicity for Nike that the ad seemed unnecessary and was very different in tone from Nike’s normal ad message. However the execution by Wieden is so spot-on that it is hard to argue with Nike’s decision to run the spot.

1. Audi A3 “Stolen A3” (Volkswagen AG)
• WSJ Rationale – Seamlessly using TV, Print, Billboards and even classified newspaper ads, Audi set up a mystery that led 500,000 consumers on a hunt to find the stole A3 which involved e-mail, IM, pagers and all manner of online and electronic clues. 500 A3’s sold in the first week of availability, in this high-profile test of viral marketing.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating – ****

This campaign is a powerful argument for well-designed viral marketing. Volkswagen and McKinney + Silver orchestrated a seamless campaign that had huge awareness among the target audience and lots of targeted chatter, online and off. What surprised us most about the campaign was how invisible it was outside of the target audience. We did not really understand the extent of the cleverness here until we started adding up the media costs for the campaign and realized how much smaller the budget must have been than we would have guessed.

The Worst Advertising of 2005

1. Coke Zero “Chilltop” (Coca-Cola)

· WSJ Rationale – The spot was intended to launch Coke Zero but fell flat because it did not explain the product which confused consumers. It also left Coke open for a successful jab in an ad by Pepsi. The WSJ thinks the problem is that Coke pitches commercials at youth but tries to appeal to older people at the same time.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ** (Click Here for our review)
While two-thirds of the editors of this blog are former Coca-Cola marketers, we must agree that ‘Chilltop’ was a failure. And it will surprise many regular readers of this advertising blog that we do not blame the failure of this spot on Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Our belief is that what could have been an excellent execution for Coca-Cola classic was subverted by the Coke Zero launch. This ad was indeed confusing and in spite of Coke’s assertion that “strong year-to-date sales” for Coke Zero prove the ad worked we noticed that Coke quickly withdrew the spot and started running another campaign behind Coke Zero.

1. Domino’s “Apprentice Placement” (Domino’s Pizza)

· WSJ Rationale - a mismanaged product placement allowed Domino’s to be outflanked by rival Papa John’s. Domino’s promotes the meatball pizza on the show but advertises a cheeseburger pizza on associated spots. Papa John’s in the meantime is barred from buying network advertising on the same show but sneaks in by making local buys in 64 markets advertising a meatball pizza. At the end, Papa John’s stole the show from Domino’s.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - *

When product placements are heavy-handed and the monetary exchange is clearly the only rationale for the placement, they are ineffective. Domino’s managed to turn wasted money into lost revenue by mismanaging the execution and allowing Papa John’s to insert the “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza,” tagline they have litigated so hard for into the middle of Domino’s expensive product placement.

1. Carl’s Junior “Paris Hilton” (CKE Restaurants)

· WSJ Rationale – A terrible example of trying to cater to the “lowest-common-denominator” this spot was bad advertising and bad publicity as it stirred up a firestorm against Carl’s in spite of limited airing.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - *

This advertising blog avoided commenting on the ad and surrounding controversy on the off-chance that it is true that all publicity is good publicity for Carl’s.

1. Lincoln Mark LT Truck “Clergy Lust” (Ford Motor Company)

· WSJ Rationale – Ford made a bad decision in producing a spot featuring a clergyman lusting over a Lincoln truck after finding the keys in a collection plate (and subsequently returning the keys to the owners and writing a sermon with the heading “Lust”). The spot had to be pulled before the Superbowl and never ran despite Ford’s huge investment in production costs.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ****

We agree with the WSJ that this spot was in poor taste and would not have been effective for Ford had it run. But Ford made the right decision in pulling the spot and did so quickly and without triggering a national scandal. While the advertising was not good, we believe that this was a good example of successful public relations. Anyone can make a mistake but to deal with it effectively is the sign of character.

1. US Department of Education “Planted Stories on No Child Left Behind” (US Government)

· WSJ Rationale – When the government hired Omnicom’s Ketchum group and they hired conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and he wrote favorable stories on No Child Left Behind he hurt his reputation, Omnicom’s and that of the Bush Administration.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - *
This advertising blog believes that the real problem here is not that the government engaged in planting stories but that in doing so they were engaging in standard PR industry practice. We believe that many current PR practices are creating great risks for valuable brands and that the day of reckoning may be soon. But that is an issue for the new year.