Each month ‘Insights in Action’ discusses how research and insight has made a commercial or societal difference and what you can learn from it.
The Context
November 26th is National Cake Day. Cake is a food beloved by the nation. This is evident by The Great British Bake Off attracting 14.5mn viewers at its peak. Cake is beloved because it tastes delicious, looks beautiful and is associated with celebrations. Cakes are in fact so awesome, one was used by car manufacturer Skoda as the centrepiece of the campaign to launch the Skoda Fabia in 2007.
The Insight
Skoda had two aims with the Fabia’s advertising: 1) highlight the Fabia’s smaller, helpful features 2) create a unique advert that stood out from the slew of generic car adverts which existed at the time.
While baking a cake themselves on Valentine’s Day 2007, Creative Directors John Allison and Chris Bovill had the idea to achieve this by building a Fabia out of cake. However, they only had 4 weeks to execute this idea. There wasn’t time for research. Instead, Skoda had to rely on their gut instinct.
The Insight Activation
Over 10 days, 8 bakers built a Skoda Fabia out of cake at Shepperton studios. 180 eggs, 100kg of flour, 30kg of dried almonds, 65kg of dried fruit (among numerous ingredients) and £500,000 later, Skoda had a 60 second advert of the baking process punctuated with the phrase “full of lovely stuff”. This was supported by a national PR campaign that focussed on how the campaign was produced. To ensure media efforts were ‘on-brand’, press releases were written on recipe cards.
The Impact
The advert’s impact was instant:
- Within a month, the advert had 700,000 You Tube views and 9 Facebook groups with 2,000+ members had been setup in its honour
- It earned £700,000 worth of editorial coverage. This included 10 national features and 2 BBC Radio 1 slots
- While on air, the advert had the highest share of voice of any automotive advert
Resultantly:
- The advert won 23 awards. This included a gold at Cannes
- It was the 3rd most awarded advert of 2008
- Research showed the advert drove significant uplifts in Skoda’s brand perceptions
There was only one negative outcome from the campaign………As the cake had been under hot studio lights for so long, it was classed as inedible. Consequently, the cake was given to residents of Clapton, East London as compost for their allotments.
The Learnings
The obvious question is: what can researchers learn from a campaign that conducted no research?
Despite the advent of automated research solutions, pre-campaign research is still often rushed. Skoda demonstrated that sometimes, rushed research can cause more problems than it solves. And in instances like this, a researcher’s best course of action is to highlight that good, value creating research cannot be done in time and creatives must rely on instinct. Too often, creatives see research as a barrier to campaign development. Actions such as this will help fix this perception and make sure that research allows campaigns to flourish and avoid the same fate as Skoda’s real-life confectionary car – the compost heap.
