The Greatest Interception Ever, Who Would You Give A Volvo To?

I would like to begin by telling you a little secret. I am a great fan of Volvo cars as you can see in the pictures below. In my family we have always been loyal customers to Volvo. However, my main objective with this blog is not to convince you to buy a Volvo car, but to talk to you about an amazing marketing campaign that Volvo used in January 2015 during one of the most important events in the hole year. The Super Bowl.

Every year, major car brands spend millions of dollars on visibility during the commercial breaks of the big game. In 2015; Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Nissan, Fiat, Toyota, and Kia spent around 60 million dollars on advertising their latest models during the Super Bowl.

Right now you might be thinking, where is the connection between American football and a car´s company. Why is it so important for this companies to show their latest models during the Super Bowl? And the most important question, why is not Volvo in this list? What did Volvo do?

So let’s begin by answering all of these questions.

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Why is it so important for this companies to show their latest models during the Super Bowl?

The Super Bowl is the sporting event of the year in the United States. At the beginning, Football used to be the main event of the Super Bowl. However, nowadays, the super bowl features three events: the game, which obviously goes without saying, the half time show created by well-known singers that do amazing performances and finally the commercials which bring an incredible opportunity to sell companies´ products and entertaining possible consumers. These commercials have become some of the biggest attractions and talking points of the whole show. On average, 30 seconds of airtime during the most watched sports event in America will cost you about 5 million dollars. That is why it is one of the most expensive advertising day of the year in this country.

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Why is not Volvo in this list?

What did Volvo do?

Volvo has always been an important and very respected car brand globally. However, they realized that they had a problem in the US. Most of their marketing was done to encourage their main costumers to keep buying Volvo cars and keep being loyal to the brand. The problem was that as a consequence, Volvo began suffering from low awareness in the US. New consumers where not entering Volvo´s market. Their costumer journey was not working efficiently.

The main objective of Volvo changed into creating buzz and awareness in the US. They wanted to include an ad during the commercial time of the Super Bowl to fulfil its goal, but they didn’t have enough money to spend it like the rest of the car companies. So what they did was to think out of the box and do something completely different. With the help of Grey New York, Volvo´s advertising agency, they won the Grand Prix Awards for Campaign entitled “Interception” at the 2015 Cannes Lions International Festival in France.

Volvo themselves did not book any airtime at all during the big game. Instead, the marketing team at Volvo and their ad agency Grey, New York, formulated a plan to sweep in, intercept other car brands’ advertising and steal the viewers’ attention. This has since been called ‘The greatest interception ever’. “So how does Volvo compete with the other car brands and their millions spent during the game? We don’t. We steal it.”

The Swedish car brand Volvo did somethingcompletely new, something daring. Something unheard of. Volvo let the word out that you could win a brand new Volvo for someone you love by simply tweeting the name of the person you would like to give the car to and hashtag #VolvoContest during any car commercial. Volvo’s commercial before the Super Bowl: The Greatest Interception Ever, Who Would You Give A Volvo To? The idea was to shift the viewer’s focus from the car commercial on the TV to tweeting about Volvo instead. Even Jimmy Kimmel talked about this in his monolog on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show.

The social conversation shifted completely and up to 2,000 #VolvoContest tweets per minute were sent every time other car manufacturers’ commercials aired. In total, over 55,000 tweets were sent. While other car brands got their 30-second spots in the limelight; Volvo was top of mind the entire game. Oh, and the hashtag became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. Volvo also scored 200 million dollars in earned media impressions. and saw a 70% sales increase for their XC60 model in the month following the Super Bowl.

In my opinion Volvo stands for words like “security”, “family”, “class”, “design”, “quality”, “ecology”, “efficiency”, “people”. When I think about this company all of these words come into my head. But specially one, PEOPLE. Volvo saw something that the rest of the car companies didn’t see. And only by looking at what consumers need, what people like, and what people care about. They used Twitter to show American consumers what really matters to Volvo. This effort is a reflection of the company's human-centric values of prioritizing people first in everything that they do.