VW Canada Uses Media with Purpose in New Campaigns

Marketers today really emphasize social and digital media and how their brand can use it to create buzz and engagement.

Most brands do this by creating Twitter handles and Facebook pages and campaigns that live very much within the digital space. Or at the very most campaigns that live on TV and extend to the digital space. But for the most part mediums are relatively isolated from one another.

So it’s refreshing when a brand can take a different approach by blending traditional media with new media and real world experiences with online experiences to create a seamless campaign, like Volkswagen has done with both the Jetta and the Beetle.

The "Driving Can be Beautiful” campaign from VW Canada and their agency Red Urban, started with TV spots that began airing this summer. The commercials featured Jetta GLIs driving as their taillights are captured using long exposure photography to create beautiful and artful images.

At the beginning of this month the second phase of the campaign was rolled out, as those images started to appear in “pop-up galleries” on walls and scaffolding all over Canada.

The framed and numbered prints weren’t secured to these walls, so that anyone walking by could grab one. And they did.

These “thieves” as VW is calling them, then taking pictures of their new art hanging in their homes and uploading them to VW’s Facebook page.

On their Facebook page today, the brand revealed clues about the locations of their next galleries and directed future “thieves” to their twitter handle @VWCanada Where other clues would be tweeted in the coming days.

According to Creativity Online, the brand has plans to continue the Jetta campaign by rolling on a third phase online and in social networks in coming months.

I can only hope that whatever Red Urban has planned for the online and social phase of the campaign is as innovative as the other work they have done with VW, like their campaign for the new Beetle.

For the Beetle, Red Urban took a very traditional medium, out of home (billboards, bus shelters, really any outside advertising), and introduced mobile augmented reality in to the equation.

Starting in September, Beetle billboards in Canada had a call to action to see the new juiced up beetle perform, which prompted the user to download the VWJuicedUp app.

Once the app was downloaded, the user pointed his mobile device at the marker on the billboard to watch the car perform. In one case, the Beetle busts through the billboard and in another a ramp comes out of the billboard and the car flips around on it (see video to the right).

What better way to sell the new “juiced up” Beetle than by “juicing up” a billboard.

These campaigns are so fantastic because in each case Red Urban has chosen a media mix with purpose. They are not using social media or mobile just because they should or because they can, they are using it to underscore and not overshadow the key message of each campaign.