It’s electric (boogie woogie woogie).
The Southern California and San Diego Toyota Dealers Associations had a new car to sell: the 2023 Toyota bZ4X, an electric SUV.
In Southern California, you’d be hard-pressed to turn around without seeing a Prius. But as established as Toyota is, it’s no secret that it and other legacy automakers are struggling to break into the EV market.
After all, they must contend with incumbents like Tesla – whose Model Y is the most popular electric SUV and claimed the title of the world’s top-selling car in Q1 2023 – and a rash of upstarts as the electric car market keeps heating up.
Adding to the angst is that active engagement has become a rare commodity in a cluttered and fragmented market.
“We look at impressions served or how many ads we’ve sent out, but if nobody’s paying attention to them or watching them, what’s the point?” said John Papadopoulos, head of media and partner at Davis Elen Advertising, the agency that worked with the dealers’ associations.
And so, to stand out in a sea of EVs and deter consumers from skipping past their ads, the Toyota dealers took interactive video ads – a new product from PadSquad – for a test drive, trying out two 30-second video spots on desktop devices. The ads ran within the video content on publisher pages, with current delivery to large-format video players.
Choose your own ad-venture
For the bZ4X ad spots, users could click into the video ad’s interactive elements for a more detailed look at the bZ4X, said Cloey Olkowski, multicultural digital media planner at Davis Elen Advertising.
The Toyota dealers tapped into product cards, which allowed consumers to pick the content that interested them by expanding different brand cards or clicking through to landing pages. For instance, they could choose to find out more information about the car’s features, California carpool stickers for EVs or available lease offers.
Aside from product cards, PadSquad offers reels – image carousels that let consumers scroll through and click items for more detail – and live polls posing questions such as, “Do you prefer red or white wine?”
Campaign goals were primarily focused on building the brand by increasing awareness, brand affinity and engagement and maintaining user attention.
To gauge the performance of the ad units, the agency monitored video completion rates, which were higher than 90%. They also noted that Asian American audiences frequently interacted with the ad spot featuring influencer Jasmine Nguyen to learn more about the bZ4X, according to Olkowski.
Most people think of watching TV and video ads as a passive experience, said Lance Wolder, head of strategy and marketing at PadSquad. But this product aims to change people’s viewing habits by letting them explore an advertised brand without exiting the ad or navigating away from the content they came to watch.
When consumers interact with the ad, the video portion of the ad pauses. PadSquad then tracks and records how much time consumers spend with a video ad, including which cards or panels got the most love. This reporting offers “a tremendous opportunity for us to change the metric [and] look at this from a new perspective above video completes and clicks,” focusing more on “earned view time” instead, Wolder said.
The Toyota dealers will keep using PadSquad’s interactive video units across many of its 2024 marketing campaigns. As the units evolve, so will their use in campaigns. For instance, PadSquad plans to expand from desktop to mobile and CTV with the interactive video ad product soon.
“As with everything,” Papadopoulos said, “we test, learn and optimize.”
