Whether you are promoting dealers vs. brands can be a little sticky... and it just depends on where you are and what the competition is...
We do some dealerships (Honda, Buick, Chevy, Chrysler, Jeep) where the stores have major competition from other dealers in the area, so those spots focus heavily on the particular dealership and why customers should by from them.
Conversely, we also have some dealerships (BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Porsche) where they are the only game in town. In our area a potential Porsche buyer has to buy from our client or go out of town... to the next dealership 150 miles away. In that case we are a little more heavily advertising the cars and
incidentally advertising the dealership.
Just a couple of other observations about car spots...
Running footage reels from the manufacturers can often be used, but the quality varys greatly. And weirdly enough, it seems that the more expensive the car, the worse the reel (and vice versa). Reels for, say, Buick or Honda... they are georgous. You'd swear Steven Spielberg directed them and Haskell Wexler shot them. But BMW or Jaguar?...hand my mother a camcorder and you'll get better footage. And often sometimes you
have to shoot your own footage. The reels are so expensive to produce that manufacturers don't always do a new one every year... sometimes even less often than that. So often times we will need a particular new vehicle or model for which manufacturer footage simply does't exist yet. In those cases we have to shoot our own. Fortuantely in our area we have found a couple of locations (the typical winding mountiain roads, bridges, etc.) that enable us to shoot running footage that mixes fairly seamlessly with the stuff from the manufacturers.
The other problem that you can quickly run into especially if you work for a lot of different dealers like we do is scheduling. They ALL want to advertise, and they ALL want to advertise at the
same time...with new campaigns typically starting right at the middle of the month when the manufacturers release the "deal details" for the month ($5000 rebate, or 1% financing, or whatever). The problem is, that they never release these details
in advance...because Chrysler doesn't want to tip their hand to Ford who wants to keep details secret from Toyota and on and on, so you never know what you are going to need to do very far in advance and it comes right down to the last minute. We've probably done as many as a couple of dozen car spots in a month (maybe more, actually I think 31 was the most we ever did)... now that normally wouldn't be a scheduling problem, but when they
all have to be produced during the
same week because none of the dealers can give you any advance info it can be tough to get them cranked out because there is a limited amount of pre-production that you can do to get a jump on it.
As I said, car spots rarely make the reel... but they definitely keep the doors open.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
