Volkswagen Speaking Advertisement in Times of India
Today(Sept 21st 2010) Times of India and Hindu Newspapers generated some fear, anxiety, amusement etc as People started opening their newspapers. A strange sound started coming, some people where searching for the source of the sound while others just got scared. Volkswagen India has started a new media innovation with Talking newspaper advertisements. The back page of the newspaper carried an advertisement of their new luxury sedan, Vento. The Back page ad on the side was fitted with a black box which when light falls on it starts speaking about the car.
The Black box was considered as ”BOMB” by some readers and they threw the paper out,while others just played around with the newspaper.
What would be the cost?
The estimated cost of this ad is around 
6 Crore (source) considering that the black box costs around Rs 5 and the ad was targeted on 25 lakh readers of Times of India and Hindu put together. But a quick calculation says that it would be anywhere between 10 to 12 crores.
Agency: MediaCom
Its quite pretty unsure why Volkswagen wanted to do a mass marketing like this for a Luxury segment car.
Reasons can be
- To create Brand Awareness and to enter into all segments in the coming years.
- Mass Marketing, Even 1 % conversion would mean recovering the cost
- Global Player – 6 crores is not big money!!
- The Media hype this sort of advertisement would generate online and offline, the number of conversations online(blogs,tweets etc)
and finally here is the Advertisement and the videos of the newspaper. Watch the video of the newspaper here
Popularity: 3% [?]