We have worked with Suzuki on lots of new vehicle launches over the 14 years we have worked together, but few were as hotly anticipated as the 2025 E-Vitara release. Suzuki was poised to launch their first ever EV – a car that would shift them from a car maker to a tech company fit for the future. They needed to make a significant splash in the ocean of car advertising. But in a sea of huge car brands and new wealthy Chinese imports, they were a minnow in the automotive game – we needed to outsmart, to make sure this EV was on every car fanatic's radar.
The Brief
Car brands run generic ads all the time, spamming TV with their huge budgets to outshout each other, placing obscure, mcuh-the-same cratives across BVOD, streaming and cinema all the time. But Suzuki had to be different, as a brand proud of their customer's 'not like the rest' behaviours and preferences.
We had a defined audience of ‘Inbetweeners’ busy, value driven families, who wanted to adopt new tech and be greener, but weren’t trail blazers – they tended to be older and led busy lives, with relatively limited time for car research. Insight showed that it could take up to 90 days to make a car purchase decision, so we knew we needed to ensure we were top of mind in that period.
What We Did
From our previous campaigns, we knew that the single biggest driver of order interest was ad awareness – we needed to ensure our ad was standing out and cutting through, which was tricky in such a cluttered and competitive sector.
We could either drive ad awareness by building reach and frequency, or we could find a way for our ad to stand out. We analysed the competitor set looking for white space and saw that competitor media spends tended to be spread pretty evenly across the week.
We knew from our audience insight that weekends were a key time for admin, car consideration and household decisions, so we had our big idea... don’t compete all the time, just win the weekend.
Our weekend strategy ran across our ATL campaign:
AV ran Friday to Sunday with key spots selected in ITV Saturday entertainment and major premier league games. Targeted BVOD supported, trialling ITVX’s new auto match feature, which allowed us target specifically those in-market for a new car. Not only an automotive first, but also a key way for us to track TV viewing behaviour through to on-site action. We also managed to snap up a Disney+ sponsorship of the Fantastic Four, to give us something ownable away from competitor clutter and tap into a weekend family favourite.
When it came to OOH; we didn’t just upweight weekends, we took over weekends!
Partnering with Bauer allowed us to run a national roadblock at 5pm on the Friday of launch – between 5pm-6pm thousands of Bauer screens across the county showed the E Vitara creative, dominating the drive home and ensuring the e Vitara launch felt much bigger than our budgets allowed.
We further boosted weekends with programmatic DOOH switching on in key roadside sites, EV chargers and service stations – ensuring we reached our Inbetweeners audience wherever they were out and about at weekends.
We had radio running on key stations Thursday to Sunday, but for the first x3 weeks of the campaign we ran a Global takeover spot on Fridays at 5pm, meaning that our ad played out simultaneously on all 8 of global radio stations, reaching 10% of the population with one spot! – amplifying the OOH activity and further ensuring that we owned the start of the weekend.
