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Monday, June 18, 2007

Mercedes-Benz and the Golden Rule of Advertising: Repetition

I'll often leave a television on while I work. Sometimes to listen to the news, and other times just for a little background noise. Lately there has been one commercial that catches my attention EVERY time. Mercedes has been running this one commercial lately about their most recent sales event. They've been running it a LOT. Some young kid playing with his Mercedes pedal car and it asks the viewer how long they've dreamed of owning a MB. At first look I thought the commercial was great....a little nostalgia, a catchy jingle, etc. Now it's starting to be annoying.

The fact that I'm annoyed by a decent commercial is not the point. The point here is that Mercedes has a commercial that I'm sure EVERYONE is familiar with. Why? Because of the repetition level. (Note: No joke, I just heard it for the second time since I started typing this post.) If they only ran it once or twice a day would anyone know about this commercial? Not likely. Would it be effective at driving home the point that there's a sale going on? Nope. Repetition in (most) advertising is necessary to make it effective.

The same is true with advertising your dealership website. Even though we explain the entire concept of websites to clients ahead of time, we've had some dealers who expect thousands of customers to come the day a website is launched. It takes time to build up some areas such as search engine rankings, and the dealers who have the most success use their site as one arm of a comprehensive marketing plan. This means advertising it, and doing so on a regular basis. If you use a full page ad in the local magazine, make sure your website is listed. Using a particular graphic or font to display the URL and keeping it the same each week will help build recognition. One of our dealers does a lot of radio spots, and they end their ads the same way each time - by repeating their website address twice.

So is it worth it to run your ad so frequently that you annoy some guy in Virginia who is involved with advertising? Probably....I am writing about it, aren't I?

5 comments:

Jeff Kershner said...

Jake, I put something in the mail today just for you. I know you will appreciate it! Enjoy!!

-Jeff

Jake said...

Oh boy...It's not going to put me over the edge, is it?

Jeff Kershner said...

it just might!

Jake said...

I think it's interesting to note that 30 days after my original post here, our blog has been getting traffic from visitors searching terms like "mercedes benz commercial little boy" and "mercedes pedal car commercial". That just goes to show that the ad campaign truly was effective, and even if those searches are purely for entertainment purposes, Mercedes continues to build branding even after the commercial has aired.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know where I can locate that commercial online, my 2 1/2 year-old son absolutely loves it, he asks me all the time "mommy, the boy and the car, i want to see it"