Wednesday, 7 January 2015

MEC Brings Mercedes-Benz C-Class Into Newsloop

For Mercedes-Benz's C-Class campaign, MEC saw the opportunity to bring the brand to Newsloop, creating a news category for the luxury car brand. 

Challenge:
In Singapore, car buying behaviors are rather standard. Interested car buyers flock to a handful of websites, they browse the Saturday press, and visit the showrooms over the weekend. As a result, advertising choices by the automobile category has become cluttered in these mediums, with little differentiation amongst car brands.
Following the success of the current Mercedes-Benz C-Class, the launch of the new model has been highly anticipated, with consumers already researching the internet weeks before the car was launched, as evidenced by search volumes.
The challenge was to engage existing and new customers and position the new C-Class as the best-in-category car by leveraging its all-encompassing technological features in a saturated and highly competitive scene. This had to be done in an entirely new and different way to stand out from the competition.

Aside from delivering the necessary reach and awareness for the launch, the campaign goal was to capitalize on consumers’ interest, driving them to test drive and purchase.

Strategy:
From a Google auto 2013 study, we know that Singaporean car buyers browse and consume multiple car reviews on the latest car models before they decide to go for a test drive. And reading such reviews is the number one activity carried out on both the tablet and mobile devices (see graph below), among all car-related research activities.  




Outside of car-related activities, our target audience’s – the successful young professionals and managers – digital behavior mainly involves consuming news content, across multiple screens (desktop, tablet, mobile),
Therein lies our opportunity to centralize all the car reviews in an environment where our target audience are already at, and create a seamless experience for the user to seriously consider a test drive in the new C-Class.
With that, we developed a unique content strategy – a first for any car brand. We created a news category for Mercedes Benz within the news aggregating app NewsLoop that would house multiple car reviews at one glance, and across multiple screens!
The idea: The New C-Class Hub in NewsLoop

Execution:
The New C-Class Hub is the first ever sponsored category in NewsLoop.
Integrating original and curated content
The category was created entirely to house car reviews of the new C-Class, across NewsLoop’s multiple platform interface. NewsLoop’s combination of expert opinion leaders and curated reviews provided a never-been-done compelling environment to showcase our content.
By combining “created content” in the form of five articles interspersed within “curated content” i.e. 3rd party car reviews, the user was educated on the key functions of the new C-Class -  Agility, Safety, Styling and Comfort.


Other Traffic Drivers
Using rich media mobile banners, the New C-Class branding went beyond the sponsored category section.
Running within the New C-Class Hub and across all news categories, the banners expanded upon a touch to a specially created mini-mobile site. Technical specs, a gallery and sleek educational videos was placed in this mini-mobile site to entice readers to register for a test drive of the new C-Class functions for themselves.

Results:
The content in the C-Class hub content was very well-received, garnering the following results:
  • 26, 288 page views garnered
Average spent time of 3.8mins within this category (compared to an average of 2.4 mins within a typical category)

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