Following a successful content-heavy launch for this summer’s Volkswagen Golf, VW and Red Urban are at it again, this time for the 2015 launch of the Jetta. And they’re taking their message global.

The latest campaign was led out of Canada and will run in four other markets, including Russia, Turkey, Mexico and Argentina, says Lynne Piette, manager, brand marketing at Volkswagen. The spots have also been picked up in Poland and South Korea.

She says the countries launching the new Jetta in the new year got together to work on a creative brief and brought in their agencies to pitch on the business, with Red Urban walking away with the win.

In Canada, the campaign soft launched at the end of October, and will have a heavy deployment in the new year, including a mass media and digital buy, handled in Canada by Mediacom, Piette says.

This latest push, which features a 30-second TV spot and six 15-second features/benefits spots, isn’t a shift away from the brand’s content-heavy approach, Piette says (referencing all the branded content plays over the past year, including the Walk off the Earth music video and Once More documentary, which rolled out this time last year). Rather, she says the car space has become crowded with companies racing to tell consumers about the new features available, but no one was really doing a good enough job telling consumers why they should care about those features – including VW.

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The 30-second spot aims to showcase that the brand provides “a refined driving experience at a price you can justify,” Piette says. It’s the last campaign from Red Urban before the account shifts to DDB in January.

Content took a light tone, focused on a single car owner throughout the series (to make the content work in multiple markets, the brand shot the spot with both North American and European models, and the campaign features no dialogue, only voiceover). Most consumers naturally gravitate towards YouTube, she says, especially when researching, price comparison shopping and looking for how-to videos. So for the Jetta launch, she says the natural space for the brand to play was YouTube.

This follows the summer campaign for the Golf launch, which took a similar content-heavy approach. However, the key difference was that in the summer, the brand rolled out a microsite, with dedicated videos on each of the major features available in the new car. “Un-average” took a highly cinematic approach to telling the story, with an over-the-top voiceover walking folks through each of the feature. Piette says the metrics shows that consumers by-and-large bypassed the microsite in favour of watching the content on YouTube, resulting in the brand’s decision to stick to the channel for the Jetta push.

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The decision to soft-launch the campaign ahead of the 2015 kick off was largely due to the brand’s heavy presence promoting the Golf and Tiguan in Q4 of this year, she adds, saying that the brand didn’t want to clutter the space too much.

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