A unique offering in its own right, and a European startup behemoth of a success story, Bla Bla Car launched onto UK television in July last year for a two month advertising burst. They did so with an animated spot and yet another peculiar character making an appearance.
The tech unicorn executed a fairly even day of week strategy, with no real suggestion of testing and refining towards better responding days. Like Motors, 20 second spots are utilised heavily in this campaign, with 57% of impacts occurring in the more premium peak-time dayparts. In the ads, the information is delivered clearly but quite quickly by a female voiceover, and a lot of airtime is given to the alien blob lead character instead. The shame here is that their ride-sharing product is actually a fantastic idea that is currently taking the continent – and venture capitalist investments – by storm. Regrettably, that magnitude and dominance does not come across in either of their spots.
Despite having an app download call to action (CTA) appearing at the very end in both versions of their ad, and no URL shown at all, our data analysts estimate that Bla Bla still achieved a commendable cost per visit of £1.92. With a clearer creative message, more day of week planning and further optimisations throughout the campaign, this number can be reduced still and it will be interesting to see how Bla Bla approach 2016 with their next TV media investment.
