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Cannes Lions

Designed for Success: The secret of winning creativity - Volvo Trucks marketing head Lars Terling

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By Justin Pearse, Managing Director, The Drum Works

June 23, 2015 | 5 min read

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The Drum, in association with JKR, is catching up with some of this year’s Cannes Lions award winners to discover the secrets of their success.

Volvo Trucks has continued its winning streak with its Volvo Trucks Live Test Series campaign, scooping the Grand Prix in Creative Effectiveness.

For Volvo Trucks Vice President Marketing Communications Lars Terling, there are three critical factors behind the campaign’s success: its entertainment value; the fact that the viewer immediately understands the features the brand wants to demonstrate; and the incredibly high quality of the craft, achieved by only working with the very best premium agencies.

To communicate the core message the brand wanted to get across in each film, Terling says the human aspect of the innovation being demonstrated was crucial, especially in demonstrating an authentic view of the brand.

“We wanted to include the guys in the basement who have worked for us in engineering for thirty years, as they’re as proud as hell of what we do,” he said. “At first there was some reluctance but now we’ve got a long queue of volunteers!”

The success of the campaign is a vindication of a strategy begun four years ago at Volvo Trucks. According to Terling, the brand had started to be seen as “boring” despite the incredibly high levels of innovation at the company.

“We wanted our marketing to be of the same quality as our products so we changed the focus to innovation. We wanted to break boundaries, be different and take the lead in demonstrating innovation,” he said.

To do this effectively, the brand decided to focus on a very limited number of product features. Although Terling said it had over 30 ideas of product features it wanted to promote in each film, the work was distilled to focus on just one. “This is much harder than talking about ten or more features but the end result is much more effective.”

Fresh from his latest award triumph, Sterling struck a note of disappointment in the lack of truly global campaigns on display this year. Volvo Trucks now runs campaigns globally, which Sterling said had not been an easy journey but is now producing incredible creative efficiency for the brand.

However, in all 160 entries this year, he said there were only a handful of truly global campaigns, for which he blamed the conservatism of both agencies, particularly agency networks, and clients.

“I really would have liked to have seen more truly global campaigns but this will be the next phase of evolution of our industry,” he said.

What is left to be said about this campaign that hasn’t been said before. Well in winning the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix, the final words are that breakthrough creative sells. In the toughest of markets. To people who buy trucks, arguably the least connected, savvy, new frontier target audience there is.

The genius of this work is that it shot above and beyond its target audience. To the mass market, to everyone. So that the very few people who purchase or use their product felt good about the choice they made. When you tell your friends and family that you drive or your just ordered a fleet of Volvo Trucks, you know they’ll know you made a good choice.

This connects the brand to everyone, to culture, to a positive feeling. And takes you out of the world of trucks and haulage and into a select band of iconic brands. Who write their own rules. So from now on you don’t rationally weigh up which truck is the most economical, has the best finance deal, or the most comfortable driving position. You ask ‘How do I work out how to afford a Volvo?’

That is the power and the magnetic pull of the charisma of the brand. And how it feels to experience creative brilliance.

Lee Rolston

Strategy Director, jkr

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