While watching TV, I noticed a set of commercials that ended with "want to find out what happened, go to smartusa.com". And I immediately thought, no one in the world is going to do that. One of these commercials shows a man running out of the gas station screaming "NO!" and the other one shows several men on a residential street pulling what looks to be dead bodies out of their cars. The film quality only seems OK, and I automatically assumed they were for an insurance agency (I vaguely remember State Farm or some other insurance company running a similar campaign).
But to satisfy my advertising curiousity, I went ahead and logged onto smartusa.com to find out exactly what happened. My first thought was "oh right, the smart car!" Now I'm a huge fan of the smart car and it took ME a while to connect the dots about this campaign - imagine the other 90% of the world that doesn't actually give a crap. The smart USA homepage only had one small link, along with 7 others, that says "what happened?" but doesn't explicitly mention the commercials. They would have been better off creating a unique URL that brings visitors DIRECTLY to the commercials - most people would get turned off at this first step. Why make it more difficult than it needs to be?
I digress. I go ahead and watch the commercials at this link and realize that these commercials are actually pretty good - both interesting and funny. Just seeing the teasers on TV left me with a sour taste, assuming it was an insurance company, and less than interested in actually going to the site. But these commercials, which could easily fit into a :60 spot are good in its entirety. Why the decision to not just put it all out there???
Smart USA has a cool ass product on their hands. In fact, they pre-sold a ton of cars before they even arrived in the USA - you had to PAY to be on the waiting list! So why would they hide it? It never appears in their teaser ads, which means they are actually LOSING exposure of their product and the good commercials they spent money to produce. You never see Dyson, Apple, OXO, or Nike hiding their beautifully designed product - no, they usually make them the centerpiece because the product sells itself.
I hope smart USA is at least smart enough to learn their lesson from this, because they certainly dropped the ball on this campaign. At least that's my 2 cents.
"I'm smart. I'm smart. S-M-R-T. S-M-R-T." - Homer Simpson
