Clutch is taking viewers to a seedy parking garage to allay fears they may have about awful experiences buying or selling cars.
In the spot, Toronto Raptor centre Kelly Olynyk attempts to offload a vehicle, but a shady buyer reneges because of auras, horoscopes and his mother’s eyes.
“Car commercials have been the same forever, they either walk through an eye-watering list of product benefits or show an overly dramatic depiction of a car scaling the Rockies at Mach speed.” says Mark Arvai, director of brand marketing.
As Arvai points out, Clutch is looking to differentiate itself as a challenger brand by being funny and deadpan about how it handles the interactions depicted in the campaign, a sore spot for its target audience worried about meeting strangers online.
Clutch is going after “anyone who has had a bad experience selling a car, [whether] through a dealership, or privately,” Arvai says, adding that the brand over-indexes to people new to Canada and women, who are more wary of pushy used car lot sales tactics and haggling.
By contrast, Arvai says Clutch is all about being easy and simple, without those kinds of power dynamics.
The brand’s last campaign urged buyers to ditch dealerships, using a flashy, tacky staple of used car lots and inflatable tube men. The campaign fared very well, and it may run it again in the future, Arvai says. However, its current campaign, “That’s Clutch,” was designed to capitalize on the NBA partnership and emphasize basketball, finding as a pitchman in Olynyk, someone not only Canadian and who appreciated the humor in the script, but who with his long locks and headband is very recognizable.
Last fall, the NBA and Clutch, Canada’s largest online used car retailer, announced a new multi-year marketing partnership that made Clutch the league’s official online car retailer in Canada. Developed in collaboration with Mint, its “That’s Clutch” campaign marks the brand’s NBA marketing partnership debut.
“We are a challenger in a very old school industry… and we need our ads to feel as different as we are,” Arvai says.
The 360 brand campaign will be rolled out in Ontario and Nova Scotia across broadcast, digital, out-of-home and radio platforms on Monday (March 25).
The brand has always been very “performance-heavy” like a lot of startups, but that it is now 30% brand, 70% performance. Arvai says it’s doing a brand health study once the campaign has wrapped. He adds that it hopes to be at 50% post-campaign and that it has mostly indirect competitors. Unlike the competitive set, Autotrader or Facebook Marketplace, it actually owns the inventory, buying the car from a buyer and selling it, which is a different business model.
True Media did TV, OOH and radio buy. Clutch handled YouTube and social buys.
