The Situation.

DaimlerChrysler Canada was all set to launch the much-anticipated PT Cruiser. It had drawn rave reviews at auto shows, and they hoped that its novel and distinctive styling would set a new benchmark for North American cars, and help update the Chrysler brand.

But when management in Windsor saw the launch campaign from the U.S., they were disappointed. They didn't feel it caught the uniqueness of this new vehicle. Instead, they saw it as traditional car advertising, not appropriate to a very important new "segment-buster."

So they asked us to produce a new campaign that would run only in Canada. We had 8 weeks until launch and a $100K production budget. (Just for some perspective, the U.S. campaign would have been developed over the course of a year, with a production budget of $2-3 million.)

The Solution.

The most important part of this campaign was the insight underlying it. Which was that people either loved this vehicle or they hated it. There was no middle ground. People either "got" the sense of fun and quirkiness that made the PT Cruiser what it was, or they didn't.

This polarization wasn't something that could be ignored, so we decided to celebrate it. Those who didn't "get it," we didn't care about, because we were never going to change their minds. But those who did get it were now part of an "in" group.

So the print ads used existing shots of the car and invited people to do what they were going to do anyhow.

To have an opinion.

And we were confident enough that we weren't going to try to affect that opinion. We invited dissent. We freely admitted that this wasn't everyone's cup of tea.

Now if you've never worked in the car business (or the ad business for that matter), this was a step of unprecedented bravery on the part of our clients, Pearl Davies and Ron Smith. Even suggesting the possibility that someone may think your new car "sucks"(the alternative was "rocks") was just not done.

Except we did.

For television, we set up a PT Cruiser on one of Toronto's busiest downtown streets, and with the help of 5 hidden video cameras and numerous hidden microphones, we gathered people's responses to the first PT Cruiser seen on the city's streets. And again, we saw the same range of opinions. And again, our client had the guts to show some of the negative ones.

But even the negatives supported our base contention. That this was one genuinely interesting, different car.

The Results.

The single most successful new vehicle launch in the history of DaimlerChrysler Canada. And Canadian sales that, on a per capita basis, out-performed U.S. sales by almost 20%.