• by Tanya Gazdik , October 10, 2024

Stellantis is launching a tongue-in-cheek social effort that compares the Fiat 500 electric vehicle to another niche brand: the Tesla Cybertruck. 

The campaign, created by Doner, shows split-screen images of the two diametrically opposed vehicles with short copy comparing the two, such as “shock” vs. “awww,” or “Ice In Its Veins” vs. “Song In Its Heart.” 

The light-hearted effort notes the extreme differences — and options — that consumers have as more EVs come to market.

The spot ends with the copy “You Say Tomato. We say Pomodoro” (pomodoro is Italian for tomato), and the tagline “Fiat 500. What an electric car should be.”

The idea for the campaign came about after Stellantis Global CMO Olivier Francois — who is also the CEO of Fiat Automobiles — drove a Tesla Cybertruck. 

“The more I was driving or doing anything, looking at it, opening the door, closing the door, I say it's funny, it's kind of the opposite of the 500,” Francois tells Marketing Daily. “Everything is opposite. It's like big versus small, round versus square, and so on and so on.”

The audiences for the two vehicles are completely different and it’s not meant to be a traditional comparison spot that asserts one vehicle is better than the other, he says. 

“That's not a point at all,” Francois says. “ In this case it's not Ford F-150 versus Ram. It is comparing apple and oranges intentionally. I mean, you cannot have most extreme. It’s like the North Pole and the South Pole.  And all the rest is somewhere in the middle.”

The ads are not meant to criticize or show disrespect to Tesla, he says. 

“It's just a kind of love letter to electric in general,” Francois says. “You see, you can have electric, you can have tomato and pomodoro, you can have electric like this, electric like that.”