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Volvo: A Product of Free Will
I’m bored with car ads. I’ve seen all the flying and skating cars I ever want to see. I know every mountain road; robots wandering round museums leave me cold; and I can’t afford and don’t want a new car anyway. So it’s going to take something a little different, a little special to get the Future Marketing Wire excited about a car launch; and a great deal indeed to get us fired up about a Volvo.
‘A Product of Free Will’ introduces the new Volvo C30 to a young audience. It’s a multi-media campaign based on the idea of overturning every cliché and car advertising formula and simply asking the audience  to make up their own mind about the design of the car. Interaction is the name of the game; and this is a significant step towards the inevitable point where consumers will be creating their own ads – perhaps ultimately for their own branded products. So all the usual props and casting are dumped in favour of an essentially honest approach that talks directly to the target audience gets them involved: to have an opinion about the C30. Even if it’s negative.
The campaign is the work of a year-old agency, an offshoot of Euro RSCG Worldwide, the aptly named FUEL. The key creatives are Chris Aldhous and Peter Hodgson,  who are no strangers to risk taking. Formerly at Publicis they were responsible for the Hype campaign, galleries and events for HP, which launched the magnificent conceit of opening a gallery with no art in it – and relying on a carefully orchestrated viral buzz to get artists to submit files, which were subsequently printed out on HP’s state of the art printers, and hung until replaced by new incoming work; a project which subsequently toured major capitals and retains a web presence, http://www.hypegallery.com
FUEL take this idea a step further; a series of 16 films around the C30 were commissioned, but without any scripts or storyboards. They wanted to build content around reactions to the new car, so they created the ‘Volvo Vox Popular’, a virtual store of over 200 different reactions to the car from across  Europe. The five chosen directors were given the various vox pop quotes to pick from, and create a film around. The films all come from the stable of the production company Not to Scale, and are designed to arouse interest and intrigue and drive people to the C30 website, and a further feast of interactive games and discussions.
Future Marketing Wire talked to FUEL’s Chris Aldhous about the films, the site, and car advertising.
FMW Can you tell us the story behind the setting up of FUEL – and why there needs to be a ‘brash offshoot’? It kind of reads like the conventional ad agency is only capable of conventional solutions, and I’m sure they’d deny that.
Chris Aldhous: I'm sure they would, but in my experience some of the larger, more established agencies are struggling to open up and allow big ideas to genuinely circulate and accrue extra thinking as they travel between floors, through departments. An integrated idea still seems to just involve re-formatting  and re-sizing the above the line thought into half a dozen different ‘unconventional’ shapes. What a waste. There’s no evolution of the thinking, just a coarsening of the execution. FUEL is small and fresh enough to allow cross-discipline thinking to bounce around the room and generate a lot of extra energy. We’re brash enough to believe that this is the only way effective 360 degree communication can be created and successfully implemented. With Volvo C30 we worked closely with Euro RSCG 4D Amsterdam to ensure the digital expression of the idea was more than just the films compressed into web banners. They took our content and re-purposed it into interactive entertainment. We licensed characters from the print work and TV spots and gave them fresh life online. Instead of the usual machinery that eats people's opinions, we found a creative idea that allowed us to celebrate the diversity of reactions the car was causing.
How do you come to Not to Scale? I can see that in a complex project like this, there are big advantages in not having 16 separate producers to deal with – but equally clearly, you need to be pretty impressed with the great majority of their roster.
We talked to three different production companies and they all worked incredibly hard on demonstrating  the strength in depth they had with a range of animators and styles. Ultimately, with Not To Scale, we just thought the balance was right for what we were looking to achieve. Animation directors based in LA, London and Paris. Some lyrical. Some in your face. Their interpretations of the lines we gave them from the Volvo Vox Popular were startling. I'm still not sure how National Television got to a family of ants being terrorised by an army of C30s but I'm glad they did.
Is it too soon to talk about effectiveness – and how do you measure that, anyway – other than in sales of Volvos? And how broad a market does it cover?
The campaign was designed to be pan-European, but now it’s going global. All the local markets across Europe were brought on board at an early stage by a touring workshop we did that introduced the idea  then brainstormed initiatives across all disciplines, all European borders. This was another way to ensure that idea had one heart but many heads. The campaign has now been taken up by more countries around the world than any previous Volvo car launch. The core idea has been expressed and expanded across more disciplines and channels than ever before. From the first press release that was headed ‘What does this car say about you? Don’t ask us’ to the wall at the Paris Motor Show where visitors were encouraged to post-it-note their first impressions of the car. Although the C30 launch has only just started, all indications are that it will be Volvo’s most successful – already in Germany they have sold ≤ of the cars they were allocated for 2007 in just one month. The work is just breaking in Canada, then the US and potentially the Far East.
Cars have been about the most traditional and predictably marketed brands going – those poor overused mountain roads; the colour supplements etc. Is this, then a sign of the times – are the colour supplements in trouble?
With this younger target audience, we always saw the campaign as a cliché-killer. We wanted to strip away all the usual lifestyle codes and hidden persuaders of typical car advertising and just talk directly to people, asking them to have an opinion about the car without the usual bullying approach. That message can appear in any media - in fact it gains even greater impact in a colour supplement where the familiar environment for the car would be a classic driving shot. The way you liberate the content of your ad - and essentially our print work is nothing more than a pack shot of the car - is by building a bigger architecture around the idea so that when people see the work they have been primed to understand it in a different way, in the wider context of A Product of Free Will. Then, when you move your audience deeper into the campaign, the experience becomes progressively richer, so the C30 website becomes as much an interactive entertainment hub and content generator as a pit stop for more car spec.
http://www.volvocars.com/freewill
http://www.eurorscg.com
http://www.nottoscale.tv/main.html
Campaign: Volvo C30 launch, ‘A Product of Free Will’
Agency: FUEL London
Creative Directors: Chris Aldhous, Peter Hodgson
Teams: Charlie Johnson & Vicky Ghose/ Caroline Lisowicz & Fabian Xavier/ Stan Gruel & Casa Hamid
Website: Euro RSCG 4D Amsterdam
Creative Director: Sicco Beerda
Films:
National TV:Love It/Hate it; Applause; Tomatoes; Take It On A Picnic; Drop It In The Sea
Rachel Thomas: Hiss It/ Kiss It; Thaumatrope; Real Man
Pierre & Bertrand: Want It/Don’t Want it; Too Exciting For My Mother
Steve Scott: Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down; From This Angle; Superhero’s Safe Car
Coan & Zorn: Ugly/ Beautiful; Many, Many Eyes; Looks Like A Greyhound
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