Progress is Beautiful
// March 26th, 2009 // 23,397 Comments » // Advertising
Over the past few years Audi has made great strides in their branding efforts by using smart, beautify designed advertising campaigns. The VW subsidiary has continued to grow market share, and perhaps more impressively sales over the last year despite the fiscal crisis and the collapse of the automotive industry. This article will examine the techniques employed by Audi in its quest for market domination. As well as the aesthetic simplicity, and beauty found in the Audi ads themselves.
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Auditory Branding
Perhaps the most unique aspect of Audi’s advertising campaign is it’s commitment to Auditory Branding. In many ways this is a throw back to the company jingles of the 50’s and 60’s, but the challenge for Audi has been how to bring the idea of the company jingle to a luxury market. Your typical jingle might tell you everything you need to know about a product, but it surely doesn’t exude the elegance, style, or grace that one expects to find in a luxury product. Audi’s director of marketing Stephen Berkov said the goal is to find out “What is the sound of an Audi”, by tying the company to a sound, or a general style of sound, it offers unique branding capabilities, and allows the brand image to be perpetuated in new, and exciting ways. Audi’s solution has been to use original scores in all of their advertising.
Here are two examples from their 2009 A4 campaign:
Progress is Beautiful
Truth in Progress
Digital Advertising
The biggest opportunity and one of the biggest challenges in marketing over the last half decade has been how to effectively break into the digital medium. It goes beyond simply making a website and trying to drive traffic to it. The challenge is to permeate this new Web 2.0 culture. Audi has used a variety of tactics including viral marketing, and interactive marketing as it’s answer to this paradigm shift.
Art of the Heist
This 2005 viral marketing campaign for the Audi A3 has too be one of the 
most innovative on record. It started with the staged theft of the new A3 model (which at this point had yet to be released), complete with broken glass and police tape. New York City was promptly canvased with flyers seeking information on the theft, and the story was picked up by local and national news outlets. Audi then went into full swing by creating a storyline behind the heist and viewers were able to follow the story on StolenA3.com, Lastresortretrieval.com, and Virgilkingofcode.com, all created by Audi. The story turned into a full blown web mini series that attracted over 500,000 participants, most of which fit right into the A3’s target market, Males, 25-34, making 150,000+. Audi execs liked to call this new approach “alternate reality branding” and it is easy to see why. In the end, the sprawling campaign included traditional print and broadcast ads, live events, online puzzles, films and gorilla tactics that spanned over 4 months, and increased the interest of the new A3 by 79% (according to the agency anyway).
A Rhythm of Lines
This 2007 interactive marketing campaign for the Audi A5 is not about the car. Its all about the driver – style conscious, creatively minded and beyond the
reaches of traditional advertising. Audi’s answer was to appeal to their creative side by letting them create their own advertisement. They developed an interactive flash website that allowed users to create their own “Rhythm of Lines” and enter them in a contest where they would be reproduced as limited prints. The creations could also be saved as desktop back grounds, or sent to friends. Visit microsite here
Mobile Marketing
The latest innovation from Audi has come with its 2009 A4 campaign in which they take advantage of the new smart phone crazy by introducing a free Iphone app. The application is available for free from itunes.
For years advertisers have explored different methods of pushing advertising into the mobile space, and various attempts to have ad sponsored phone service, ads before calls, ad-funded dialup services and even location aware ads pop up as SMS messages as you travel around have all basically fallen flat… Audi shows us how it’ll be done in the future with Audi A4 Driving Challenge. Dave Taylor
Simplicity of Design
I have always been attracted to Audi’s ad campaigns for two reasons, great music, and simple, elegant design. To finish up I wanted to include some examples of how simply and directly Audi conveys theirs messages. Not commentary here, the ads speak for themselves.
