Test Drive A Renault, Get A Private Show From Dancing Girls
Experiential ads are taking over.
Renault UK allowed two unsuspecting people to test drive its new Clio model with a fake car sales person.
When the drivers stopped at an intersection, they were asked to they try the "va va voom" button on the car's dash.
Upon doing so, they were immediately transported to Paris in the form of an impromptu piece of street theater — via a kissing couple, an Eiffel Tower backdrop, baguette and rose vendors, and then dancing girls and guys.
The two ads — one featuring dancing women in lingerie, the other topless men — embraces the trend of immersive "experiential" ads that plunge everyday consumers into strange situations, which are filmed for YouTube. Belgian agency Duval Guillaume popularized the trend when it released a video last year for TNT, in which people in a random European square were bombarded by biker gangs, gun fights, and other dramatic scenarios after pushing a red button. The TNT spot now has more than 44 million views.
The Renault ad incorporates not only the button pushing, but another ingredient of a recently successful experiential ad: a test drive gone wrong.
Pepsi's most successful social video ever, released earlier this month, had race car driver Jeff Gordon dress up and take a used car salesman on a high octane, terrifying test drive. (It also turned out to be completely fake, but that didn't stop it from becoming a viral success.)
Renault's carefully planned ad was created by Manning Gottlieb OMB and Unruly's Social Video Lab. Unruly is a social company that tracks online videos that go viral and breaks down the causes of its success.
This is Unruly's first time working with a company on making an ad that it thinks will go viral.
One significant difference between Renault's campaign is that both TNT and Pepsi only had one video meant to appeal to both sexes. Renault broke its campaign into two videos: one aimed at mainly at guys (featuring women in lingerie) and the other mostly at women (starring a batch of shirtless dudes). Will this decrease or increase the overall sharing?
Here's the other ad:
And here's the TNT ad by Duval Guillaume: