Commentary

If You Like Red Cars, You'll Like This Online Commercial,,, In Red


The future of online video is probably not being led by car salespeople, but I’m sure if I spent an hour with one of their better closers I could change my mind.

Still, you’d be hard pressed to find a business that has been as radically and quickly transformed by digital media as car-selling Their ads have changed and their tactics have changed and their customers have really changed.

It used to be you came to a dealership to be sold to and generally, hassled.

Now, most car buyers have been to several Website services that have explained all the fine points, including the bottom-line price, before they ever step foot into a dealership. When a customer walks in now, it’s usually for little more than some perfunctory haggling and... onto  the paper work. Online selling is where a lot of the pocketbook battles are now fought. The emotional stuff still happens at the dealer.

So an article in Automotive News gave me pause because it’s another bullet in the car-sellers’ online gun. A company called Eyeview can now gain access to the color of the car you were looking at online--most car companies allow for a quick pallette choice--and then make sure that’s the color of the car you’ll see in subsequent online video advertising that will inevitably follow you around online. Or it can let the customer choose the color in the ads he or she is going to watch.

AutoNews says “Eyeview is betting that its color-morphing capabilities will trigger an emotional reaction from consumers who spent time researching a vehicle and likely visualized themselves in it.”  

An additional step, it would seem to me, would be to take the car I am falling in love with, in the color I want, and plop it down in front of an urban landscape in my home town. If I lived in Chicago, seeing the new Megahorse SUV-thing, in fire-engine red, parked in front of the Wrigley Building would let me feel I have arrived (and also that I’m about to be towed, but you get the point).

Online shoppers already know they can go online to look at shoes and blouses and shirts and change the colors. Warby Parker’s site lets you put a pair of glasses on your own silly face, if you choose.

But adding that kind of personal zest to a slick commercial, pinpointed to my inner-most color wheel, is, well, something. Or so Eyeview believes, and if they’re right, there’s hardly a reason every ad you see online for any product couldn’t pay attention to your color preferences, eventually.The Eyeview ads can run on just about any kind of device.

“We’re reinforcing something that they [the consumer] created, which is going to push somebody to have an emotional” response, Erik Schear, Eyeview’s executive director of sales, told the auto mag, in a very sales-y kind of way. “You can’t do that with one TV ad, and you’re not creating seven TV ads with different colors.”

So let’s talk floor mats...

pj@mediapost.com
1 comment about "If You Like Red Cars, You'll Like This Online Commercial,,, In Red".
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  1. Nancy Kalish from Interpublic Group, July 22, 2014 at 10:13 a.m.

    Unless the consumer's preferred car color is silver, silver gray, other silver, other other silver, black or white, he or she will soon find that the brick and mortar dealer doesn't have it and isn't going to get it in -- ever -- without a special order, so this may be overpromising, however appealing.

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