[Orchids & Onions] VW drives off with award for combining brand and retail in ad

Creatives focus on the former because they have freer rein and can allow their imaginations to roam further. It is also the building block of a successful brand – you create an image for it, which is accompanied by clever words, great pictures and the odd joke. It’s what makes the creative advertising world go around.

Then you have retail, which does the hard yards, rather like Cinderella shining the shoes and washing the dishes, while her flighty stepsisters have a good time.

Retail advertising – where there is a call to action or a push to purchase – is, to use ad agency clichés, where the rubber hits the road and it is at the coalface. So, it is much less glamorous – there is normally a price pitch or an emphasis on value to get a consumer to take out his or her wallet.

Seldom do you get creative retail ads. Seldom do you get ads that can combine the best of brand and retail to tell the bigger story of a product’s virtues but at the same time get feet through the door.

Volkswagen SA and its ad agency Ogilvy managed to achieve this with some short, simple TV ads linked to special deals running last month. The two I saw were amusing vignettes, which combined a focus on a product intrinsic and a call to action – all in a way that made you smile.

The first was for the Golf GTI with the multi-clutch DSG automatic gearbox. We saw two cool dudes hanging out together, drinking beers and talking about how cool life is. One said he loves “Free...dom”, which brought a quizzical look to the face of his friend. “But you live with Carol,” he said, looking around at the obvious signs of female presence in a male pad – a bra and pink trainers lying around; a purple upholstered heart cushion on the chair and, as he raised his eyebrows even further, a fluffy white cat. The punchline – “You won’t even notice the change.” That’s true as much of the one bachelor’s life as it is of the GTI gearbox. Then a special offer price was flashed on to the screen.

The other execution featured VW’s Jetta and the fact that it can achieve fuel economy as low as 6 litres per 100km. We saw a school concert and an audience of proud moms and dads getting to their feet after a performance by a group of pupils. One mother screamed, whistled and clapped. She carried on doing so long after everyone else had sat down, much to the chagrin of her daughter on the stage. Then came the punchline, applicable to both the mom and the Jetta: “Keep going a little longer”.

© Screengrab from the ad

Both ads were amusing but they were a fine example of how to combine brand and retail advertising. Orchids to VW SA and to Ogilvy.

Generally, I don’t notice ads on websites. Most other people I speak to don’t, either. That’s not good news for the digital industry, which is facing a further threat in the form of ad-blocking software, the use of which is growing exponentially all over the world. And South Africa is no exception. So, digital ads have to be much cleverer to capture attention. One which did this week forms part of Coca-Cola’s latest campaign and it popped up while I was on IOL.

It featured a pic of someone downing a Coke in a very visually appealing way, but it was the line “Gif the feeling” which caught my attention. A GIF is an animated digital image. That piqued my curiosity, so I clicked and was taken to a place where I could type in my particular feeling and “activate” a specific GIF. I hit “hot” – which is when you really need a Coke – and, sure enough, I got a GIF. Then I caught myself because I realised that playing this game could become addictive – like swatting flies on screen with a digital tennis racket – so I went back to catching up on the news on IOL. However, I did realise I had been sucked in by an effective piece of marketing communication. And effective marketing communication gets an Orchid for Coca-Cola.

The other side of digital advertising is the sometimes bizarre ads that get “served” to you – whether on a website or on Facebook. Again on IOL, I began reading a piece on local “personality” Khanyi Mbau, written by colleague Debashine Thangevelo. Whatever you say about Khanyi, you cannot describe her as boring – and one needs to keep in touch with all sorts of societal trends in this job.

As I was reading, my eye fell on an ad alongside the piece – for a “Mobile jaw crusher”, a huge piece of earthmoving or mining machinery, judging by the photo. The company offering this piece was Kefid Machinery, located (as its website says) “in a historic city and transportation hub in central China-Zhengzhou”. The site itself was bizarre enough – especially the fey anime girl called Crystal, who is “inviting you for an online chat”. It turns out this is about Kefid’s service and not a lap dance, but you might be forgiven for mistaking the intention.

I wonder at the positioning of such an ad in such a jarring environment. Does Kefid really think a mover and shaker making decisions on the purchase of multi-million dollar pieces of equipment would be reading about Khanyi Mbau?

But the Onion doesn’t go to Kefid – because they had nothing to do with this. This was some form of automated “programmatic” digital buy. And that program deserves an Onion for wasting client money.

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