Last week, Volvo chose the team of Havas' Arnold and the independent Nitro to manage its global advertising business, which is estimated at $150 million. This transaction, which retains Volvo's interactive and direct duties, follows a 16-year run with Havas' Euro RSCG.
The review was led by Tim Ellis, the Goteborg, Sweden-based client's director of global advertising. The review started in January and got down to Arnold/Nitro versus Publicis' Fallon in the final round. In an interview, Ellis distinguished the winning agencies, how Volvo will evolve beyond safety and Hyundai's attempts to poach its contenders.
When asked about Volvo's positioning with Arnold and Nitro around, Ellis said, "I wouldn't say we're broadening the positioning beyond safety. I would say that we're redefining safety, meaning that we're redefining the bigger promise behind what safety really means. It's about identifying an idea in which safety is very firmly grounded in the core, but it presents the brand in a more emotional, desirable way."
He added, "We are a high-end, upscale brand. Therefore, we need to present the product in a context that is high end and upscale - something that people can aspire to. What we've done before is be very inconsistent with our message. We have talked about the things that all car manufacturers talk about - performance, design, safety, high technology - but we haven't wrapped all that up into one single-minded proposition that communicates what Volvo is all about. To do that, the idea has to build off and leverage the core brand properties that people know about Volvo, which are safety, care for the environment and care for people."
The Swedish automaker has already made a good name in connection with safety, durability and quality. The manufacture of its auto parts, even the minutest parts like the , rotors, brake pads, suspensions and more, are meticulously done to ensure quality through years of use.
"The idea has to redefine that in a new, exciting way. It's about why does Volvo focus on safety? It's about the care for people, the togetherness you get with a Volvo, the promise of how Volvo builds their cars," Ellis noted.
Speaking about the biggest surprise during the review process, this is what Ellis has to say: "The biggest surprise was that the Volvo brand is not an easy nut to crack. It's a bit of a paradox because we have to continue to be leaders in safety, but at the same time, safety is a very rational positioning, and high-end cars are bought on emotional platforms. Therefore, how do you emotionalize safety and move it to a more desirable arena like our core competitors? It was a tough brief."
What did the Nitro present to make it outshine the rest? Ellis quipped, "They're a very dynamic group and are growing quite fast. One of our core emerging markets is China. They have a very strong office in Shanghai. And from Shanghai, they moved West, which is very interesting and unusual in the advertising industry. That in itself was very appealing and attractive to us. Even though they have a relatively small agency compared to the others competing in this pitch, they have great clients like Nike, which requires a lot of emotion and a lot of passion, which again, is something we want to focus on with Volvo communications."
When it comes to interactive ideas involving Euro and others, Ellis said that they will lock in on a core idea and we properly brief and collaborate with the other communications partners to make sure that the essence of the idea stays, but that the expression or execution in that particular channel is relevant and powerful. "The difference will be now, as opposed to doing different campaigns over time, all campaigns will be locked into one core idea. That's the major difference between how we're going to operate now and how we operated before. We're moving away from the campaign-to-campaign approach to more of a brand approach," he added.
What set Arnold and Nitro apart from the rest of the competitors is distinctiveness. "One of the biggest surprises was to see some of the cases that were relatively shallow from big agency networks. [They were] just creative ideas, but not really grounded in any real core insight or business problem that was being solved. Clients are looking for what they can't do, and they're also looking for agencies that have great ideas [and] the ability to communicate those ideas with passion and great persuasive power," Ellis noted.