Luxury auto intenders are multitaskers. It’s a behavior that comes in handy for the marketers at Jaguar Land Rover when it comes to maximizing its TV budget.
“We still have a big investment in TV, so we’re always looking for ways to extend the reach of that investment in a smart way,” said Kim Kyaw, Jaguar Land Rover North America’s manager of digital marketing, social media and CRM.
A little more than half Land Rover’s advertising budget – 55% – is given over to television. Depending on the campaign, the remainder is split between digital and mobile.
And that means cross-screen is starting to play a larger and larger role in Land Rover Jaguar’s overall strategy.
“We know that, according to Nielsen, more than 85% of people are on their phone or tablet when then they’re watching TV, and that means they’re probably not watching the commercials,” Kyaw said. “For us, the answer is using second screen technology to our advantage.”
To that end, Land Rover Jaguar teamed up with Alphonso, a company that collects and activates cross-screen audience data, to extend TV viewership to mobile and desktop.
The auto brand ran two different campaigns with Alphonso with disparate but overlapping KPIs. Mindshare purchased the media in both cases.
The first was a mobile branding campaign to increase awareness around Jaguar, an extension of the “British Intelligence” TV ad starring British movie villains that Jaguar ran during the Super Bowl.
Jaguar then developed a series of ads featuring actor Nicholas Hoult as a Q-from-James-Bond-like character, designed to showcase the brand’s technological superiority. The goal was to extend the reach of the original TV brand campaign in order to increase recommendation intent and boost purchase consideration.
The Hoult videos were retargeted at users who were verified by Alphonso as having also been exposed to the villain TV-only ads.
In a second campaign, Land Rover used Alphonso to increase awareness and consideration around its SUV Range Rover Evoque model by running a conquesting campaign on mobile targeting audiences that had been exposed to TV spots from Land Rover and from competing auto brands, including Audi, Infiniti, BMW, Lexus, Mercedes and Volvo. Full-screen interstitials invited users to click through to and engage with content on Land Rover’s website.
Additional targeting was layered on in the form of age – people who were in the market for a luxury vehicle ages 25 to 54 – and financial status. Interest in Jaguar is good, but interest without the ability to actually afford a Jaguar wasn’t going to work, said Kyaw.
For Land Rover, Alphonso partnered with an independent research company to measure the conquesting campaign’s impact versus a control group, noting a 74% lift in brand consideration among those who were exposed. The click-through rate on the interstitials was 12.4%.
On the Jaguar side, Alphonso worked with comScore to determine that the targeted James Bondish videos garnered a roughly 5.5% increase in unaided brand recall and a 13.8% uptick in brand recognition. The videos themselves saw an 80% completion rate.
In both examples, the reach extension to mobile also enabled Jaguar and Land Rover to punch above their weight in terms of ad spend, Kyaw said.
“One of our biggest challenges is that we’re in the bottom third of automotive advertisers, with a relatively small budget in comparison to our main competitors,” she said. “Mobile is a way for us to stand out in what’s become a cluttered marketplace in the TV environment.”
But in terms of sales, it’s a little too early to tell.
“For us, this was much more about attitudinal change first, before behavioral change,” Kyaw said.
She noted, however, that the brand’s investment in cross-screen is likely to increase.
“It makes a lot of sense for us to use cross-screen to achieve a higher level of brand metric that will hopefully lead to a lower funnel shopping action,” Kyaw said. “We’re will always expand whatever helps us meet our business objectives. Our approach is to innovate, to test and to learn.”
