BMW - through to the final in Aller Best

When the BMW i4 was named "Car of the Year 2022" by Dagbladet, Elbil24.no and Dinside.no, the car manufacturer could not "leave it under a chair". Aller Media took up the challenge. And delivered the best BMW figures ever.

- We had held a car seminar earlier in the year. There we presented cases we had previously worked on for other car manufacturers. That's how we came into contact with BMW.

This is according to Sindre Hellkås, Strategic Group Account Manager at Aller Media. And when BMW's electric i4 was named "Car of the Year 2022", BMW and Aller Media put their heads together - and made plans for a campaign that would make the credibility of the editorial articles go hand in hand with a real impact presence digitally.

- It's important to see the value of the editorial coupled with the display surfaces. That combination is incredibly powerful. The result is that the editorial increases the credibility of the commercial message, because people who have read the article about BMW being the car of the year have this in the front of their minds. It provides quality leads.

But BMW didn't really have any special plans for the i4 beyond the launch itself. It was entered into the competition at the twelfth hour.

- The i4 is actually launching this March. BMW made an exception for Norway, where the car model was launched already in November due to the availability of cars. Norway is a different country when it comes to electric cars. Almost 80 percent of new car sales in this country are electric cars. In this way, we also became a test country for the launch of the i4.

- But then the car was named "Car of the Year" and they wanted to talk about it?

- Hehe. Yes, they were. They were very keen to highlight that! Our goal was therefore to create maximum awareness of the award. We have previously had a takeover on Dagbladet.no, but now we did the same on Børsen.no at article level and ran full-screen displays on DinSide.no and Elbil24.no. We also combined this with dominance in the paper edition," says Hellkås.

And it hasn't been done before?

- No, the solution of combining digital and paper in this way has never been tried before in the Aller universe. And it may seem like a gimmick to run the campaign in the paper edition as well, but we saw that it had a surprising effect.

Increased pride - and the best BMW results ever!

The idea was to communicate directly to paper readers in addition to the dominant digital print. But the paper edition brought with it an unexpected bonus when the newspaper was sent out to all BMW dealers in the country.

- We saw that there was no small amount of pride attached to it internally at BMW and among the dealers!

- And the campaign also resonated with readers?

- Yes, as many as 84 percent responded afterwards that they had heard that the BMW i4 had been named Car of the Year. "We've never had such high figures. It is only through Aller's channels that BMW has communicated that the model won the award. We reached a lot of people.

- Almost all of them, actually?

- Hehe. Yes, that's exactly what we did. It says a lot about the car interest of Aller readers, and it says a lot about the fact that the editorial articles are actually read," says Hellkås.

The numbers are clear: Never before has any BMW campaign achieved such a high impact. Not in any month, regardless of model. As many as 14,000 readers clicked through to BMW during December and configured their own i4. The number of readers who clicked on the BMW i4 landing page was 73,000.

- Those are high numbers?

- These are very high figures. The fact that one fifth configure the car and send 14,000 leads to the dealer afterwards is actually quite extreme. In fact, they are the highest ever for BMW in Norway. The number of readers who have configured a car ended up at 19 percent. This means that the number who have sent an inquiry to a BMW dealer after clicking on the campaign is actually the highest number in all of Northern Europe.

Or as campaign manager Thea S. Høgh at BMW puts it: "Those are crazy numbers!"

A digital car

The fact that the impact was so great was perhaps a little surprising. What is usually measured in a car context is the test drive. But there were only 15 models of the BMW i4 in the whole of Norway, and what they had in common was that they were on showrooms at dealerships. Only the first 15 got the car there and then, the rest had to wait until 2023.

- This means that no one has actually seen or tested the car. The car is not due for delivery until 2023. So it's pretty special that 14,000 readers have clicked in and sent leads to the dealer to ask about price.

- It was a digital car?

- Yes, definitely. What's the name of the virtual art that's so popular these days? NFT! It was almost a bit like that. The numbers are extreme, traffic to the BMW landing page increased by 136%.

- It must have been a real brand boost for BMW?

- Absolutely. As I said, the model was launched in November. Then there was a lot of activity, with campaigns on radio, TV and everywhere else. Our campaign ran in December, and then it ran exclusively in Aller's channels and outdoors. Yet our campaign resulted in 60 percent more configurations of the car compared to November, at a third of the cost!