General information
Sector: Services
Media: TV, radio, online
Time period: 2019 – 2020
Case description
A Car-Pass is a document that shows the milage history of a vehicle and it has to be provided during the sale of any second-hand car in Belgium. With the Car-Pass, buyers know exactly what kind of second-hand car they are buying.
The Car-Pass got a thorough facelift in 2019. The Pass, which before the change only showed the mileage, evolved into a document with 5 parameters. To raise awareness of this change across the market, Car-Pass and its advertising agency SQUARE created the campaign concept “The Date”.
The campaign made the analogy with dating: often the person showing up for a date ends up looking older than their profile picture or they drink or smoke too much. Two TV commercials with this theme were created. In the two TV spots we see a conversation between a man and a woman on a date in a restaurant and a bar, respectively. As the spot progresses, the camera’s point of view shifts and we see that their date is an old red Volvo. The enthusiasm quickly changes when it turns out that their date is not as young as in the profile picture and also turns out to be a drinker and a heavy smoker. They quickly make up an excuse and leave.
The concept of the TV spots was masterfully translated into radio. There we hear ‘the day after’ where a friend asks: ‘How was the Swedish one from yesterday?’, referring to the Volvo of course. The reaction? The profile picture did not match what she looked like in real life. And she drank quite a bit (consumed a lot), and she smoked too much (emission problem). The conclusion? Keep looking.
TV was used for the long-term image while the radio campaign was used to increase brand awareness, targeting listeners in their cars and encouraging them to find out more information about the Car-Pass.
Campaign results
Sigrid Claerhout, account director SQUARE commented “The combination of radio, tv and online gives us 5% more net reach compared to a media plan without radio.”
Var used their DIVA study to test the radio spot and the results showed that the recall of the radio spot was 49%, which increased to 79% when tested on listeners who also viewed the TV campaign. Furthermore, 78% of listeners also indicated that it is clear which organisation is behind the spots. This increased to 88% for those exposed to the TV spots as well. The results of a post-campaign test conducted by media agency Mediabrands showed that radio had the highest attribution with an impressive score of 46% compared to TV and online video with 37% and social media with 34%.