Why The Population deserves to win the Toyota Yaris social media pitch
In this guest posting, Peter Bray picks his winners and losers of Toyota’s real world social media pitch.
This has been a great exercise for our industry in general. It has caused us to not only examine the traditional pitch process, but also to call into question exactly what social media is, how agencies deal with budgets, pitch tricks and whether or not advertising can co-exist peacefully with social media. The Toyota Yaris pitch it has been valuable conversation, sometimes it has been bordering on litigious, but the discourse has been happening.
My ranking is based not only on the idea produced, but also something that is very important to clients in a pitch process, being a realistic understanding of what they get for a certain budget. If agencies knowingly create a $100K campaign on a $15K budget and are prepared to make a loss in order to win the pitch, this to me is not only disingenuous, but it also will put the client/agency relationship on the wrong foot from the start as false expectations will have been set. Clients that are swayed by an agency that is prepared to make a loss in order to win the client in the short term should be aware that nothing is free, and the winning agency involved would seek to recoup its costs down the track.
Fifth – Saatchi & Saatchi – Clever Film Competition
(A few declarations of interest: Hothouse’s Scott Rhodie co-presents the Mumbrella Podcast, and I’ve taken a ride in Wolfy’s car)
The beauty of our guest postings is that they generate interesting opinion pieces which I don’t necessarily agree with. This is one of those occasions.
For what it’s worth, I think scoring Hothouse poorly for getting a video blogger (Blunty) to do some of the heavy lifting is a bit of an underestimate of the potential role of PR in social media. For me, good PR is partly about building relationships with people like Blunty so they will do that sort of thing for you and your brand if there’s something in it for them (original content). On the other point, as Toyota had to approve the campaign, clearly they must have provided the car at cost rather than list price.
Iris lost my vote from the moment that somebody (I’ve no evidence it was someone from the agency but they also made no effort to stop it) got caught astroturfing this site with a string of positive comments about Bootboxing from the same IP address. That’s not good stuff for a brand to get caught up in.
Cheers,
Tim Burrowes – Mumbrella
Hmm – I completely disagree. The Populations campaign was actually fairly ordinary. It is a tenous link between which city is the greatest and the actual car itself.
The Sydney vs Melbourne thing basically meant that all memebrs at the Pop could recruit all their friends and therefore make up the majority of the 6,000 or so people
The one thing I know abotu the Yaris c ause I have one is that it looks cool and edgy. The Hip hop video actually used the car and tapped into a young cool genre, therefore a much better fit for the Yaris brand.
not sure an essay was required here
hothouse – got youtube ‘internet famous’ guy who appears to be well removed from the target audience of the vehicle to give away a car to the best comment. will it sell cars?
iris – got local hip hop guy and guest cast to do an inane video slamming doors and using the indicator and horn to make the sort of music that makes you angry. if toyota are giving out $15k for similar efforts I would like some cash to subsidise the recording and video of me farting the instrumental of pharoah monch’s ‘simon sez’. will it sell cars?
saatchi – have to respect their lack of effort. outstanding. will it sell cars?
one green bean – cute idea aimed at targeting the trade press and not consumers. either brilliant or completely misses the mark. will it sell cars?
population – hard to tell. in isolation seems tokenistic but as part of a wider ‘relationship’ idea you never know. will it sell cars?
If the brief was to create social media buzz, Populations was the closest. If the brief was to create a great stunt using social media channels to support it, OGB wins it for me.
The best thing of all… they all got paid for doing the pitch.
That’s what this industry should be demanding. We give too much away for free.
The biggest take out from all of this is that there are a few marketers out there prepared to shake things up and try new stuff – about freakin time! And good on Toyota’s digital bod for doing just that.
At this rate there won’t be an agency called The Population for much longer, the two co-founders have both recently left for jobs at other agencies!
Is it against the “rules” of social media to use off-line media to support a social media idea? Not sure.
I thought the Wolfy idea was memorable and added some street cred to the Yaris brand, but this benefit could have been much greater if it was supported with some targeted off line media like street press/street posters etc.to rapidly extend the campaign’s reach and fuel conversations amongst people outside of the industry.
I’m gonna put it out there…
The Iris Bootboxing campaign is the only one which I considered good/interesting/entertaining enough to be shared with my friends. It therefore wins my ‘social’ award.
Whether I or any of my friends will now buy a Yaris in the next 12 months is still undecided.
Will it sell cars??
Ultimately Marketing it about increasing sales, however one of the most important parts about Marketing is Branding. So, while most people touched by these social media experiments will not automatically go out and purchase a Toyota Yaris, the name is out there in some way, shape or form. So, when a young 20 something year old wants to purchase a car then hopefully Toyota Yaris is somewhere on the list.
leanne … branding is the facade people hide behind when they can’t attribute anything tangible to their ‘marketing’ efforts.
yes, am aware that it’s highly unlikely that someone will go out and buy a yaris tomorrow as a result but will these efforts contribute to influencing the decision of someone who might be looking for a car in 12-18 months and didn’t have Yaris on their consideration list?
i guess it doesn’t matter as there’s no way of tracking it … but luckily we can measure the important stuff like retweets and facebook friends.
Hi all
Some have asked me privately why I have been possibly too nice in my review of the work.
I don’t think that I have been at all. As an agency that was on the original list of 13 or so, I know how hard it was to get in the top 5, and no I have no affiliations with anyone at the final five. As I mentioned, being held up for public scrutiny isn’t easy, and for that all the agencies should get a pat on the back.
As I made very clear, it is an incredibly subjective area, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Toyota disagreed with my opinion in all counts, and they would be equally “right” as me.
I’m looking forward to seeing the next phase of the pitch.
Cheers,
Peter
Larry, brand work most certainly does sell cars. Far from not being trackable
, there are some decent research companies that can track results from this sort of campaign. Ben