#OrchidsandOnions: Songs in the key of family life... another Volkswagen hit

I was reminded of this again this week with the new ad for the Volkswagen Golf. It features a cute (hats off to the production company and casting agency!) little girl who has so much attitude and energy… a bit like the Golf, I suppose.

Screengrabs from the ad.

She is the life and the soul of the nursery school and is moved by rhythm, always jiving, always moving to the beat in her heart.

Then Dad comes to fetch her – in the New Golf, of course – and the musical party continues… courtesy of the great sound system in the car.

Dad turns up the music loud and the two of them share it – she playing “air drums” enthusiastically – as they go.

The ad works as a piece of marketing communication on a number of levels. It showcases the car well – in its attractive shiny metallic paint – and highlights its features (like the sound system).

But it yet again underlines VW’s place in the market as the true “People’s car”, because, first and foremost, the company’s products are the sound tracks to the lives of many people. I know – I owned a much-loved VW Jetta for 24 years.

It also shows that part of a family’s life when it is all so simple – when there is so much love… for life, for each other and, most of all, for the VW parked in the garage. Another Orchid for VW and its agency, Ogilvy. It won’t be the last, either, I’m sure.

Last week, I was in London for a conference hosted by business consulting giant Accenture, on “Millennials”. I was a bit wary because seldom has so much guff being talked about a “marketing demographic” than about these people – those born after 1981.

Supposedly, they are a new generation, which looks at marketing and advertising – and the whole way they live and interact with each other – from a totally different perspective. I was expecting to be swamped with waves of rubbish about them, but was pleasantly surprised when this was not the case. Accenture showed many examples of harnessing technology to improve business and reach customers – both Millennials and non-Millennials.

Interestingly, someone from BBC Worldwide’s sales team shared their research which shows that – surprise, surprise – 60 percent of Millennials share the same attitudes and values towards life and towards marketing as do non-Millennials. And, of that remaining 40 percent, the real marketing (i.e those with money) niche in the Millennial demographic for companies like BBC Worldwide, is surprisingly small. However, I did find one Millennial company which did annoy me, simply because it employed that age-old marketing technique of misleading customers.

taboola.com is an organisation which promises to promote your website content across a range of publishers worldwide, “for as little as $10”, according to its own site.

That sounded quite reasonable, so I looked further. Only much further down – after much scrolling through the huge benefits of the product – did I discover the reality.
That $10 is actually $10 a day. Quite a big difference.

New tech. Old smoke and mirrors.

An Onion for taboola.com.