Creative Strategy Bank Spots Honored; Heil-Brice Gets LA Times
Mazda North American Operations, Irvine,the largest client at the Newport Beach office of Doner,is moving ahead with plans to hike its TV media buy.
Mazda has said it plans to increase its TV spending by 45% this year vs. last, according to Advertising Age, which reported that the automaker spent $127 million in TV in 2000.
Two new 30-second spots for Mazda are set to hit network and cable TV soon: one for its 626 sedan and the other for the MPV minivan.
Both,linking childhood memories to the fun of driving Mazdas,are set to air through April and continue with Doner’s “Zoom Zoom” theme.
“The biggest reason we are focusing on television is because this “Zoom Zoom” thing has just caught fire,” said Tim Blett, Doner president, automotive.
Doner unveiled the campaign last year, and the jingle and little dark-haired boy featured in the television spots has gotten people talking. Not too long ago TV personality David Letterman nicknamed the boy “Little Rusty” and showed cuts from commercials for about a month straight on his talk show. Late night show host Craig Kilborn has also given the “Zoom Zoom” jingle a plug on his show.
Blett said tracking studies have shown the campaign has raised awareness for Mazda and helped the automaker stay on track despite an overall slowdown in the automotive sector. The automaker was up 20% in March 2001 vs. the year-ago month, and it was up 23% in the first quarter of 2001 vs. the first quarter of last year, according to Blett.
Cable Win
Fullerton Community Bank used humor and a cartoon character named Warren to try and lure more customers,and win four cable TV awards sponsored by Ohio-based Center for Creativity, an organization that provides information and seminars to creative communication professionals.
The 11-branch savings and loan tapped agency-of-record Creative Strategy Partners, Fullerton, to develop a series of four 30-second TV spots, as well as print ads and brochures. The thrift spent about $200,000 on the campaign, including the media buy (handled by Creative Strategy), illustration and production.
The commercials, which are airing on local cable channels such as CNN and TNT, caught the judges’ attention,or at least Warren did. In one spot, the character,illustrated by the OC shop and animated by Happy Trails Animation in Portland, Ore.,walks by a big bank. A voice says, “Now serving number 917,” and then a cow standing in line moos. Warren skips the big bank and enters a Fullerton Community Bank, where he finds mariachi music and someone to shine his shoes.
Stacey Andelman, vice president of the 10-person agency, said Fullerton is “very service oriented,” with tellers who call customers by name.
“We tried to play that up so they can compete more successfully against the bigger banks,” she said.
Creative Strategy began working with Fullerton Community Bank in 1998, and handles all of its marketing, including collateral and building signage.
Bits and Pieces:
Newport Beach-based Heil-Brice Retail Advertising recently was tapped to handle the Los Angeles Times advertising account, ousting incumbent Ground Zero in Marina del Rey. The OC shop,which won in a closed review with four other undisclosed participants,will break a campaign later this year that focuses on the paper’s classified advertising John Christensen has joined The Irvine Company as senior director of media relations. For the past several years, Christensen was a communications consultant in OC for several clients including the County of Orange. He also served a stint with the Portland Trail Blazers as the team’s communications director Steve O’Leary, president of the T & O; Group, Irvine, was recently chosen to be chairman of Worldwide Partners Inc., a Colorado-based global marketing communications corporation that offers a network of agency partners across the globe. T & O; is part-owner of the company. In his new post, O’Leary will begin a new branding campaign promoting the global company, among other tasks Northwest Airlines recently tapped Aliso Viejo-based MindArrow Systems Inc., which delivers and tracks multimedia e-mail messages over the Internet, to create and deploy an opt-in e-mail promotion to push its WorldPerks frequent flier program. The message,sent to 50,000 WorldPerks members,reportedly contributed to a 244% increase in traffic to Northwest’s WorldPerks site within the campaign’s first week. Mindarrow also recently deployed an e-mail message for Chase Bank, which resulted in it raising $1.1 million for the United Way.
