Sunday, December 07, 2008

Smart "Tear-Off Parking Lots"

The greatest advantage of a smart is its incredibly small size. Given today's often jammed streets, driving a smart simply is a smart decision. To demonstrate this, they chose typical trouble spots, places where finding a parking space really is a challenge. The logic behind their campaign: a smart takes up exactly the same space as a regular F200 poster. So they produced over-sized poster pads containing a number of 'parking spaces', ready for tear-off. An approach that was all the more effective considering that posters are the key medium around parking lots. People had fun with the billboards, all of the sheets were gone within a short time, and they obviously enjoyed installing their own parking spaces within the city, thus fooling around a little with the police… The whole campaign quickly became the talk of the town. Smart received dozens of reorders for the billboards. The tear-off posters were installed at strategic inner city locations, particularly in those places where parking spaces are truly hard to come by. Their billboard campaign tripled the number of test drives taken in the smart centres of the region. Together with the other measures of our autumn campaign, this led to an increase in Q4 sales of 15%.

Agency: Jung von Matt Zurich, Germany.