Who: Clutch, with Mint for strategy and creative; True Media for traditional media.
What: “That’s Clutch,” the online used car dealer’s first major brand-building campaign, and its first since signing a multiyear sponsorship deal with the NBA last year. The new platform focuses on the company’s ability to come through for its customers when they need it most.
When & Where: The campaign launched this week (March 25), and runs through November in Ontario and Nova Scotia. It includes the brand's first TV advertising, complemented by digital, out-of-home, and radio.
Why: Much of Clutch’s marketing to date has focused on tactical advertising intended to reach prospective car buyers and sellers in digital channels. “That’s been highly effective for them, but it doesn’t build brand love,” said Mint’s executive creative director and partner, Kim Tarlo. “It’s more functional.”
“That’s Clutch,” represents a strategic shift towards brand-oriented marketing, with a goal of building awareness in a crowded marketplace that’s dominated by legacy car sales platforms such as Auto Trader and Kijiji.
It’s also about building credibility for a relatively new way of selling used cars, in which Clutch serves as both an online buyer and seller for used cars.
“This type of proposition exists in other markets, but it hadn’t yet come to Canada,” said Tarlo, who said the brief was to be “disruptive and bold,” while challenging the established ways of buying and selling used cars.
How: The campaign’s launch spot shows how Clutch enables would-be car sellers to avoid one of the primary annoyances experienced by almost anyone who’s ever sold anything online: the “oddballs” that seem to exist for the sole purpose of frustrating—and even disturbing— sellers. “He’s exactly what you’re afraid of meeting,” said Tarlo.
It features Toronto-born NBA player Kelly Olynyk—wearing his Toronto Raptors uniform—meeting with a prospective car buyer in an underground parking garage.
From his awkward failed fist bump, to oddball comments about the height of both the car and Olynyk, to the car’s colour (“more grey than silver,” which reminds him of his mother’s “cold and unloving” eyes), and offering the NBA star a boiled egg from a bag, it’s clear this buyer is, how to put it delicately, a weirdo.
Eventually a disturbed Olynyk makes his escape, while the man calls his mother to tell her “it happened again.” The spot ends with the super “Avoid oddballs who lowball” and drives directly to Clutch.ca.
Tarlo said having Olynyk wearing his Raptors uniform in a non-game situation was a deliberately tongue-in-cheek reference to how professional athletes are typically depicted in brand ads.
And we quote: “Car commercials have been the same forever; they either walk through an eye-watering list of product benefits, or show an overly dramatic depiction of a car scaling the Rockies at mach speed. As the first challenger brand to enter the used car industry in a decade, we’re excited to deliver a campaign that looks and feels refreshingly different.” — Mark Arvai, director of brand marketing, Clutch
