Toyota Buys Half of All German Billboards
May 02, 2007

Toyota has plastered billboards all over the German landscape in what a publication there reports is the largest billboard campaign in the country’s history -- by a long shot.

To introduce the Auris compact wagon in Europe, Toyota has purchased every available billboard in 82 of the largest cities in Germany for 10 days straight. That’s 202,000 billboards -– about half of the country’s 400,000 available billboards, the German advertising association (ZAW) estimates.

A ZAW official said no such campaign had ever been done on this scale before. An industry expert estimated Toyota’s cost at up to 30 million Euro, though the Japanese automaker likely received substantial rebates for such a high-volume ad buy.

The last big billboard campaign in Germany was a Volkswagen product launch that used 90,000 billboards at a cost of 12 million Euro.

A massive ad campaign is required for the Auris, which replaces the huge-volume Corolla. The Corolla is the highest volume car ever sold in the world, surpassing the iconic Volkswagen Beetle. Despite that volume, the Corolla in Europe had a staid, dull image -– an image Toyota is trying to shake with the Auris.

Toyota also is trying to make further advances in Germany where it became No. 1 among Japanese imports in 2006. Toyota recently got a boost from the former environmental protection minister, Renate Kunast, who recommended German consumers buy the Toyota Prius hybrid to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

The billboard campaign represents an unusual way for a car company in Europe to divvy up its ad spending, an expert noted. Billboards typically are one of the least used means of advertising. Typically, 40 percent is budgeted for TV, 33 percent for newspapers, 20 percent for magazines with radio at 5 percent, billboards at 2 percent and industry journals at a scant 0.4 percent trailing behind.

Toyota hired Zenithmedia to plan and execute the campaign. Another ad agency from Dusseldorf, BMZ+more, created 27 themes for the billboards. Those themes show people of all sorts, from children to grandparents, and from varying professional and ethnic groups. One uses animals instead of people; a dog and bull are transfixed on the Yaris.

Despite this being Germany’s largest-ever billboard campaign, Toyota has launched big advertising efforts before. Several years ago, Toyota aired TV commercials that starred singing monkeys and the slogan “Nothing is impossible.”

The expensive campaign nudged Toyota’s German sales only slightly, and prompted one expert to remark that “the only thing that did not move during that campaign was market share.”

Toyota clearly is hoping for more with its latest massive billboard campaign.

Posted by Michelle Krebs at 8:35 AM under News , Toyota | Comments (3) | digg this | Seed Newsvine