MEET THE EXTRAS

Bronze Spike

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TitleMEET THE EXTRAS
BrandKIA
Product / ServiceKIA CERATO HATCH
CategoryA01. Best Fictional Program, Series or Film where a client has successfully created a drama, comedy or mi
EntrantINNOCEAN WORLDWIDE AUSTRALIA North Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Entrant Company:INNOCEAN WORLDWIDE AUSTRALIA North Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Contributing Company:INNOCEAN WORLDWIDE AUSTRALIA North Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Production Company:FINCH Sydney, AUSTRALIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Scott Lambert Innocean Australia Creative Director
Jenny Mak Innocean Australia Copywriter
Lyndal Kearney Innocean Australia Art Director
Tania Templeton Innocean Australia Head Of Broadcast
Kathy O'connor Innocean Australia Planner
Simon Hornery Innocean Australia Group Business Director
Janine Allan Innocean Australia Business Director
Nick Ball Finch Director
Jeremy Rouse Finch Dop
Julianne Shelton Finch Producer
Karen Bryson Finch Executive Producer
Rob Galluzzo Finch Executive Producer
Peter Sciberas Finch Editor
Fuel Vfx Post Production
Song Zu Music/Sound Design

The Campaign

Most of the Branded Entertainment to date in Australia has been web based content or straight up product placement – not entertainment developed around a brand strategy. In 2010 the 4 Australian free to air commercial networks – 7,9,10 and SBS, all added digital channels, vastly increasing the amount of advertiser supported programming available to consumers. There are now 16 free to air channels in a market of 21m people. The free-to-air networks consider a show successful if it pulls over a million viewers an hour. Their digital channels need about 300,000 viewers to win a time slot, and cable can range from 15,000 for non-sports shows up to 150-300,000 for blockbuster event shows. Australians have always been early technology adopters. The fractured media landscape and the challenges of pitching brand-funded shows to the networks, has pushed advertisers to the internet as a viable cost per eyeball way to measure return on investment for branded entertainment. As advertisers move from a model where they supply a car as a consumer promotion on a game show into branded shows, where the ‘channel’, story, character or situations are built around a brand agenda, there is tremendous scope for long-form storytelling.

Results

The key objective was to increase sales for the Cerato Hatch, in spite of the fact that there were no improvements to the car, change in body shape or additional features on offer. Although a solid small car, there is nothing really exciting about it, and sales had been flat. What the Cerato does traditionally offer however is many features that come as standard. The creative challenge was, how to make a group of standard features stand out in a compelling way. So we created a series of short films about ‘The Extras’; a collection of quirky characters that personify each feature and showcases the benefit they deliver to the driver. People watched the films on the web, and they found personality in a car that had been perceived for a long time as being boring.

A National TVC and a series of web banners drove the consumer to our dedicated "Meet The Extras" Microsite. It was here that they could watch our series of comical short films about "the Extras"; standard features that are anything but standard.

After just one month, test drives for the Cerato Hatch increased by 227%, brochure downloads increased by 142%, and time spent on the microsite was 600% longer than the time spent on the generic Cerato home page. And amazingly, sales increased by an average of 53% month on month compared with the same time last year. And let's not forget, that this is exactly the same car that had been on the market for the previous two years.