Car week
Welcome to Best of the Week, kicked off on Friday afternoon at Sisters Beach Tasmania, and wrapped up in icy Evandale this morning.
Today: The week revolved around car ads, real and otherwise. I’m underselling it. Do read on.
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Together in electric dreams
Range anxiety
It’s been a week that began and ended with things that felt like car ads but mostly weren’t.
We’ll start with the ending. Last night felt like being in an NRMA ad.
I drive a tiny electric car with limited range. The great lie of EVs, I’ve learned over the last few months, is that they cannot manage anything like the range the manufacturers say they can.
The distance from my shack at the beach to my place near Launceston Airport is 180km. Naively, I’d assumed a car promising a range of 250km would be sufficient. Which it is, if you put it into eco mode. And drive well below the speed limit. And don’t use anything extraneous like AC. Or lights. Or drive up any hills. Or against the wind.
Otherwise you’re not going to make it in one go.
Over the last few months, that’s not been too much of a drama. There aren’t many chargers on my route - this is rural Tasmania, after all - but there is one along the way where I can top up for half an hour while I pop into Coles.
Last night I completely misjudged things. Heading home in the darkness from dinner at a friend’s, I noticed my range had suddenly dropped to 55km, about 60km from home.
In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a cold Tasmanian night, I pulled into the empty car park of a touristy ice cream place to figure out what to do.
And there, shining in the darkness, were two NRMA EV charging stations that I didn’t know existed. That $11.72 may have been the most cheerful purchase I’ve ever made.
Doubt it
The week also began with a moment that felt like a car ad, but wasn’t.
On Sunday night CommBank launched its big new brand ad, “Doubt Never Did”.
The line doesn’t replace CommBank’s overall “Can” positioning but sits alongside it, or possibly underneath it.
And I really, really wanted to like M&C Saatchi’s campaign. It features many of those elements that make us feel nostalgic about advertising. It’s a big budget, big ad shot out in the desert. It’s worth watching more than once to admire the craftsmanship. It even kicked off, like days of yore, with a big cross-channel Sunday night TV ad buy.
It features a Wacky Races combo of Australians snapping out of following everyone else to metaphorically (and non-metaphorically) take their own directions and follow their own dreams.
Thanks to the magic of CGI, at one point a couple head in opposite ways in half a car each after an amicable split. As Billy Joel observed, they parted the closest of friends. Others speak of launching a podcast (two confident white men of course), taking a European holiday or owning an ice cream truck.
All while Wolf Mother belts out Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life.
And yet, it’s remarkably unmoving. A mean-spirited criticism of such campaigns is the adland insult “your strategy is showing”.
I think the problem comes down to the line. “Doubt never did” is convoluted and negative. It’s the opposite of “Just do it” and harder to remember.
Not dreaming
And (not) speaking of dreams, Uber Green’s effort, from agency Poem, put cast mates from The Castle into a car.
They’ve clearly not cut production company Working Dog, owner of The Castle, in on the deal. So they certainly weren’t going to risk using the “Tell ‘em they’re dreaming” line. That would be expensive IP.
If you judged the campaign by the ad, you’d be disappointed. It was kind of low rent. The actors reunited and riding round in the back of an Uber Green car with some crappy library music.
But that misses the point. Poem is a PR-led agency and the ad was merely an (electric) vehicle to build news around. They ran a media event, held in the pool room of the Bob Hawke Beer and Leisure Centre (for those outside of Sydney, yes that’s a real - and excellent - pub).
And it worked. The media jumped at the chance to chat to the Kerrigan boys.
Triple M’s rising stars Lu & Jarch - Luisa Dal Din and Jack Archdale - made the most amusing use of the opportunity, playing the game of trying to get the cast to say the line, while The Today Show’s Richard Wilkins hacked out a giant Dicky-style plug for Uber Green too.
And of course, the Daily Mail covered it like the Daily Mail always covers the ageing process…
It was the earned media case study of the week.
Little things
Another smaller ad with a bigger idea came from Thinkerbell.
Mattel Brick Shop is an attempt from the toy manufacturer to break into Lego territory.
Racing driver Craig Lowndes fronted the ad, shot from false perspective to make it initially look like a real car. They then extended that into putting it on sale on the Carsales website. Carsales do so well out of it, that at first I suspected they might be the real client in some Adam Ferrier-style misdirection.
The campaign also goes further into remixing the message with the medium by recreating the original long copy print ads for the cars being recreated.
Imagine the hurdles to jump to get sign off from Mattel, Hot Wheels, Mercedes and Carsales.
Splendid.
Long way to the top
And The Castle wasn’t the only slice of Australiana, with a Mitsubishi family camping trip soundtracked by AC/DC’s ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)’.
Or a long way to The Shop if you want a sausage roll.
As creative agency Richards Rose’s chief creative officer Adam Rose conceded to Mumbrella, the song rights came with “a hefty price tag”. It looks like money well spent.
The real question though, is how the hell are they charging the Outlander in the middle of a camp site?
Those NRMA chargers really are popping up everywhere, aren’t they?
More change for Vinyl Group
Friday was another day on the Unmade Index where Vinyl Group lived in dog years.
Linda Jenkinson, who has chaired Vinyl Group since April 2020 when the company was still known as Jaxsta, will step down as chair but remain a director.
Jenkinson will be replaced by Ken Gaunt. Fellow directors Steve Gledden and Ben Katovsky both revealed they were leaving the board after three years, claiming the transformation plan they had been appointed to oversee has been completed. In May, both Gledden and Katovsky disclosed that they had sold some of their stock.
The company which has been cutting costs as it tries to reach CEO Josh Simons’ pledge to hit break even by the end of the year, said it would not be replacing Gleddon and Katovsky on the board.
We also have a correction to last Saturday’s BOTW item on Vinyl Group. I included the phrase: "Vinyl said the deal will see Songtradr get at least another 5% of the company.” That was incorrect - Songtradr will be issued shares equating to over 5% of Vinyl Group's last reported equity interests.
Meanwhile, it was a mostly down day on the Unmade Index. Pureprofile fared worst, losing 9.6%, while Motio wasn’t far behind, dropping 7.7%
Seven West Media saw the biggest improvement, gaining 3.5%
The Unmade Index closed down 0.76% on 572.2 points.
More from Mumbrella…
Opinion: The future of generative AI will be free, but the cost is you
ACM and News Corp journos strike pay deals, ABC offer rejected
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you’d like a little more from me, on this week’s Mumbrellacast we discussed the CommBank and Mitsubishi ads. On last night’s episode of Medialand, now available as a podcast, we talked to SBS managing director James Taylor. And I make a cameo appearance on today’s Game Changers Radio podcast.
We’ll be back with more soon.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
