One of the campaigns that I am most proud of, is the work I’ve done for the In-Market program these last three years. Let me give a brief explanation about insights, how it comes into play and how our innovative ideas have helped changed the advertising landscape in this space.
The car purchase cycle is about 3-4 months for the average consumer. It starts off with someone first coming to the realization that they either want or need a new car. The national advertising (big splashy TV spots and other national media) does a great job in driving excitement and intrigue around a new vehicle model during the first month of that purchase cycle. After that phase, comes the research phase. So if you’ve bought a car in the last five years I’m sure you spent some time on sites like KBB.com, AutoTrader.com, Edmunds.com etc. to do research to help make a purchase decision.
For the next three months the average consumer will spend that time researching to help refine their purchase decision. To give you an idea of the importance of these sites, more than 73% of all new car buyers have said that they made a purchase decision based on the research they’ve done while on these endemic sites. So with that said, there is a huge opportunity for advertising to become a way for people to learn even more about the Toyota line up.
This is where the In-Market program picks up.
And how data begins to shape the ad.
Advertising on these sites are done primarily through online display ads. While other agencies have a cookie cutter approach to how they make their ads (read: don’t spend much time thinking about it) we’ve come up with the first massive scale dynamic creative display campaign. (Boom.) Utilizing that new technology our online ads are ever changing, living and anticipating our consumers wants and needs.
Each ad has almost 2 million different permutations of how it could potentially appear. Everything from the car color, background color and copy is all served on the fly. The ads learn about each user over time, and the communication adapts to what we believe our potential customer is looking for. We wrote over 2,000 lines of copy across 21 different model lines. Also we found a way to serve their car color preference, so if they are searching for a lot of red cars, we will serve red cars to them in the ad. That way we are delivering the most relevant product story to the right eyeballs. Check out the below:
The success of the program has been phenomenal. We’ve seen these ads out preform areas like search and social when it comes to pushing up purchase consideration. This is only the first part of the program. I’ll update with more as we launch new technologies and ideas.