Manuel Angel Alonso Coto

There’s a new BMW in town: It’s the 1 Series and it starts for under €30,000 so it’s a BMW youngster might actually be able to afford. That’s not actually the advertising copy from BMW but the company is using roughly half of its ad budget to push the 1 Series — estimated from $15 million to $25 million — on online media, specially Facebook. By comparison, executives at BMW of North America say, Internet ad spending for other models ranges from 1 percent to 15 percent of the total ad budgets. On the social media site, users will get to build their own 1 series and send it to friends. The company hopes to woo new shoppers to the brand who may have never considered it before.

“The goal has become ‘to give people a reason to engage with or participate in your advertising,’ said Patrick McKenna, manager for marketing communications at BMW of North America in Woodcliff Lake, N.J…. ‘We’re trying to let our hair down a bit and have some fun’ with the campaign, he added. That is evident in the offbeat ads being created for Facebook, which include the chance to design virtual cars.”

Thus BMW’s Graffiti contest invites Facebook users to color in outlines of 1-Series cars has done a few things very well.

1.- Ad units on Graffiti app pages within Facebook as well as websites outside of Facebook (eg, Boing Boing) are performing better because the campaign invites participation.

2.- It enlists a core group of active social-network participants (more than 6000 submissions so far, 7 days in) into a fun, transparent evangelism effort: Participants spend, in many cases, hours personalizing images of BMWs that they then share with friends.

3.- It takes advantage of the friend-to-friend newsfeed mechanism at Facebook to spread word of the campaign beyond the paid media program.

4.- The concept and the images themselves are capturing the attention of bloggers, columnists and Twitterers.

BMW will also advertise on Yahoo! and MSN, but the Facebook move gets our attention most. The company will have virtual road trips from one Facebook page to another. We’re not sure how that will work but the gist is to get the shopper — and his or her friends — involved and not to cram the message down their throats.

What do you think? Would interactive ads of this kind motivate the youngest buyers towards a BMW car or do they just want to see something more traditional coming from one of their parents' favourite brands?

Best regards

Manuel A. Alonso Coto

Posted on 12 April 2008 in E-MARKETING

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