Goals and objectives
When considering the purchase of a new car, most people typically have just two brands in mind, often including the brand of their previous vehicle. This poses a significant challenge for Renault in the Czech market, where Skoda dominates and Renault doesn’t even rank in the top 10 car-selling brands. Renault’s overall brand awareness is high but struggles to establish strong, positive brand associations.
So, how do you turn the tide? Renault’s strategy focused on leveraging emotions. For its new model, the Renault Austral, the company created a high-production TV spot centred around the theme of pure imagination. Our task was to extend and adapt this concept for online Czech audiences, working within tight time and budget constraints.
The goal was to create something new and unusual to break through the typical automotive marketing communication dominated by strong competition from other car brands and draw positive associations towards the new model, Renault Austral.
KPI's
The objective was to do something quickly (we only had a month and a half between the brief and the “publication date”) and within the budget of 500 000 CZK (approximately 20 000 EUR) that would increase the awareness of the brand-new model Renault Austral and its favourability among Czechs. Since Renault struggles with building strong, positive brand associations, our task was to develop a concept that would break this. In other words, when raising the brand awareness of the Renault Austral model (KPI: a minimum of +10 percentage points), our major KPI was to raise its favourability more than its unfavourability.
In terms of the creative outcomes, we set up the following secondary KPIs: 60 000 pageviews on native articles (this PVs target reflects the media budget) that promote the hero content with an average time spent of 2:55 minutes (the time target was set this way: every third user would watch the whole video and spend additional 2 minutes on the content & 2/3 of users would skip the video and spend two minutes on the article), 20 000 video views (every third user) and 10 000 audio downloads (every sixth user).
Target audience
The target group for the new Renault Austral is people aged 35-54, of which a total of 73% are parents or guardians of one or more children. The data also indicates that Seznam websites are relevant for this target group. In total, 55% of people from the target group have set Seznam.cz as their homepage, and 70% visit it daily.
Strategy
We constructed the initial strategy around two goals. First, we wanted to build on the concept of the TV spot’s theme of ”Pure Imagination & Underwater World” we also knew that we needed to localize it effectively to the Czech environment while adding a wow factor that would stir emotions and positively impact the perception of the Renault brand and specifically the Renault Austral model. Second, we wanted to build on the fact that 73% of potential customers are parents, which also tied into the TV spot featuring a father and son.
While other automotive brands focus on the practicality and features of their vehicles in their marketing communications, we set out to go in a different direction and not create auto-moto content at all. Yet still be able to link it back to the Renault Austral model naturally. The goal was to create a campaign unlike any other in the automotive industry.
At the same time, we wanted to create something interesting for parents. Considering that parents already deal with many challenges: lack of sleep and energy, an overload of irritating children’s content, other marketers constantly targeting them or the abundance and inappropriateness of gifts from family members and friends (those that make noises), we wanted to offer them something useful. This would subsequently support positive associations towards Renault Austral if we incorporate it into the content sensitively.
We started from the insight that for drivers, it’s natural to listen to any audio format in the car, even when transporting their children. However, they face a dilemma whether to play music or podcasts that entertain parents but not children, or children’s songs or fairy tales that entertain the children but can be a headache for the driver. This led to the idea of ”Fairy Tales for the Car,” designed to entertain children and be pleasant for parents to listen to (thanks to both the story and the sounds). We wanted to use the new Austral as a source of inspiration, in which we have everything under control except our imagination. This ties back to the headline from the TV spot. And who are experts in imagination? Children! Due to their boundless imagination, we wanted to involve them in the production. Almost anything is possible in their minds, and we wanted to try to peek into their magical world.
The Renault Austral itself does not appear in the fairy tales, but all of them start like this: ”Settle in comfortably and fasten your seatbelts. Renault Austral brings you a fairy tale that combines child imagination with a story created with a little bit of help by artificial intelligence.” And they end: ”Here our story ends, but yours doesn’t have to. Perhaps set out for it in the new Renault Austral, which brought you this fairy tale. Packed with the latest technologies, advanced assistance systems, and a superb ride feeling that will surely exceed the boundaries of your imagination.” All are narrated by the voice actor of the fairy tales.
Creative idea
We had already determined the direction for our strategy, but saying we would delve into the world of children’s imagination to create fairy tales for children and adults is one thing; executing it, and in a very short time, is another.
Our journey began in a kindergarten, where we engaged with children through various games and exercises to see what ideas and imaginations we could evoke. We also knew we wanted to partially revolve around the underwater world theme from the TV spot, so we tested how well we could guide them to tell stories about it.
Then, we moved to fieldwork, to verify our findings and record everything directly. During a drive in the new Austral, available to us for only one day, we asked three children aged 4-11 several questions to find out what was going through their minds during the ride. We drove out of the city into nature to inspire their surroundings and let their imagination run wild. For part of the ride, we blindfolded them to focus solely on sounds, which helped us develop the underwater world visualisations.
The children’s imagination truly amazed us. They spoke of walking closets, geometric gods, or a jellyfish that plays tennis. This became the basis for our fairy tales. To create the actual fairy tales, we needed a quick script production for audio recording. We used the ChatGPT language model, into which we gradually uploaded all the collected fragments of the children’s imagination. This created a basic script for the fairy tales. Reality showed, however, that if we wanted something original, smart, and also appealing to adults, we needed to involve our senior editor. For most fairy tales, we ended up using ChatGPT for inspiration on unconventional naming of characters and places. For example, we came up with a brilliant name for the planet where the already-mentioned walking closets live.
We also added a strong visual aspect to the fairy tales and promoted them through a native article that unveiled their creation. We guided readers through the world of unbridled imagination. We showed them a video of driving children around in the Renault Austral and extracting all those gems from them. We concluded with a link to the created fairy tales, alongside a light infographic of the Austral model, which appeared across the graphic design as well.
The thoughtfully devised graphic design concept draws inspiration and subtly refers to surrealism, a movement that sought to capture dreams, imaginations, feelings, and thoughts, and is inseparably linked to France. The collages stimulate the viewer’s imagination and, in their ambiguity, attract his attention.
The motifs subconsciously refer to themes like unlimited space, possibilities, and imagination. Shades of warm colours only highlight the meaning of the word “australis” (root for Austral) and create an excellent contrast to both the water and the used photographs of the car, making it stand out without being distracting. As the icing on the cake, the composition discreetly includes small references to individual fairy tales.
Channels
We uploaded the fairy tales to all podcast platforms such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts. At the same time, we placed them, along with the video showcasing children’s imagination and the Renault Austral in action, into the visually enriched article published on the news website Seznam Zprávy. We knew that this would reach the majority of our target group.
Content distribution and promotion efforts
For the promotion, we utilized article teasers not only on the news website Seznam Zprávy but also across the Seznam.cz portfolio (the news website Novinky.cz, the automotive website Garaz.cz, the sports website Sport.cz, the tabloid website Super.cz, the lifestyle website Proženy.cz – all of which have a relevant target audience). We used dozens of different versions and optimized them throughout the campaign. It turned out that the most effective were those showing children with blindfolds in the car interior, titled around what can arise when we let children’s imagination run free.
We also utilized the social network Facebook for promotion. We promoted both the video as a standalone piece and the native article using mainly article teasers.
Results
The native article garnered nearly 120,000 pageviews, doubling our KPI. Moreover, we hit the target average time, which was 2:54 minutes. The video embedded in the article received almost 60,000 plays, but most importantly, it maintained a high completion rate. Half of the viewers (48.4%) watched it to the end, and the average playtime was 2:05 minutes (the video lasts 2:44 minutes). The fairy tales themselves amassed over 20,000 downloads on podcast platforms. They engaged listeners to such an extent that even after the campaign ended, users continued to download them without any media support. As of today (updated for February 22, 2024), we still record around 100 downloads daily. What campaign could be more effective than one the client no longer has to pay for?
The main goal of the project was measured using the Seznam Brand Lift tool, which assesses the campaign’s impact on the awareness and appeal of the Renault Austral model. It’s a one-click survey comparing people exposed to the campaign with those who were not, based on a sample of at least 1,000 respondents. The control group matches the campaign’s target group. Control measurements occur both before and during the campaign to exclude the influences of other activities (e.g. TV).
The fairy tales delivered a 12 percentage point increase in overall awareness Renault Austral – this number is net of the impact of other media types and formats. Most importantly, they delivered positive associations with the Renault Austral model, with a 17 percentage point increase, a phenomenal success compared to all other activities in the Czech Republic supporting the model. All other formats increased both the favorability (on average +3 percentage points) and unfavorability (on average +4 percentage points) evenly or even unfavorability to a greater extent (responses to the question “How do you like the new Renault Austral”: I know it, but it didn’t captivate me / I know it and it captivated me). Whereas fairy tale listeners even saw a decrease in unfavorability by 5 percentage points.
The results clearly show that fairy tales are not only loved by users but are also a highly effective format, on which we can subsequently build towards consideration. Almost every third fairy tale listener states that the Renault Austral caught their interest.
An interesting positive signal was the campaign generated a relatively high click-through rate to the client’s website (nearly 2,000 direct clicks, even though it was not the goal) - especially compared to previous campaigns. For these users, we recorded a significantly lower bounce rate of 36.34% (average BR 55.47%) and a significantly higher average time spent on the Renault Austral website (2:32 minutes vs. the average ATS 1:15). People thus spent more time on the website with the Austral, clearly demonstrating increased interest in the new model. For a brand that has long struggled with low consideration, this is a great result. It also confirms the at-first-glance risky strategy that significantly diverged from the norm and prioritized non-automotive content was well worth it.
Learnings
Forget AI, people are everything. AI and language model tools are great for saving time and providing some extra inspiration, but the created content on its own is actually very average. It definitely highlighted the importance of top senior people in our team from editor to graphic designer.
Going against the tide seems to be in most cases where the magic happens.
Brands do not have to be the heroes of the stories in order to get superb brand lift results, but they have to be seen at the right time and place.
Great content will live on its own, even if it’s actually an ad.
Fun fact: we focused so much on getting the visuals right that we were left with only one day to code the whole Native article. Luckily by some miracle, our Web coder managed it.