In all honesty, I was a little nervous approaching the launch to our business. It could never be the seismic shift that our Carfuffle campaign was having never run national TV campaigns before. The emotion of that launch was incredible, as was the impact to the business, and I guess I was worried about trying to recreate that. But I was making the wrong comparison. This campaign was different. It was built completely on insight (even more so than Carfuffle). In other words, it was Smart.
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| Meet Smart Finger - not modelled on me! |
Going into this campaign we knew what worked: how consumers responded to seeing our product on screen; which channels and programmes generated the best engagement; the need to communicate the benefits of the product; and requirement to make it enjoyable. You'd think with this that we'd be an easy client for our creative agency, Brave, to manage - but we were a pain.
The first problem is that we don't understand why other people don't find Motors.co.uk as interesting as we do. I will never be able to rationalise this. I simply hope that everyone will become a believer like me.
The second is that when asked to summarise why consumers should come to Motors.co.uk it takes my MD and I about 5 minutes to run through the many advantages of our site. Apparently it's not efficient to buy whole ad breaks listing the many ways in which we think people should visit.
We'd made the decision to move on from Carfuffle which was essentially a launch campaign introducing something new, but finding a campaign that would be as endearing to us was always going to be hard. And this comes back to the emotion of the initial launch. Could we ever fall in love again like we did with Mark, our headless chicken and Amy (feedback on the ad had a lot of people falling in love with Amy)? But did we need to? We knew what would work and had some great creative ideas to work with that would hit all of the areas perfectly.
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| Amy's ad was banned from Nickelodeon! |
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| Mark astride his headless chicken |
Then we met Smart Finger. It was love at first sight.
I expected this to be watered down over time as we poured over scripts and countless edits, but the attention to detail from Blac Ionica and the immensely talented pupeteers and model makers brought it to life. Add to this Peter Serafinowicz's barking voice over and frantic 80s soundtrack, and the pace and urgency of the need to visit Motors.co.uk is brought to life.
"And the best thing about Smart Finger..." as our ad says, is that it empowers the consumer - they feel smart by using our site. Hopefully this psychology won't be lost in the viewing.
Given what we've learnt in the last year, I always expected the ad to be intelligent and good. But the energy and ambition that pours from the ad is the truest reflection of the team at Motors.co.uk. Now, "get your smart finger out and find the right car for you at Motors.co.uk"!
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| Ok, when angry, he does look like me! |
