Campaign: Cars Cares
Company: Cars.com
Nonprofit Partner: Competition between Adopt-A-Classroom, Alliance for a Healthier Generation, Cameras For Kids Foundation, Reading Is Fundamental, SADD, Scholarship America, VH1 Save the Music
Launch Date: January 27, 2012
[/box]Campaign Description:
Cars.com, an online car buying resource, will leverage their Super Bowl presence for good this year via a new “Cars Cares” cause marketing campaign. During the game, when the Cars.com commercial airs, viewers who use the popular Shazam App to tag the ad will earn $1.00 for one of seven charities in a winner-takes-all contest for a maximum $100,000 donation from the brand. The charity with the most votes on the Cars.com Facebook page will win the cash prize.
Our Take:
Per Ad Week, up to one-third of Super Bowl ads this year will be “Shazam-able”, enabling a branded interaction with consumers via their smart phones. While others are using Shazam to offer coupons, giveaways or exclusive content, Cars.com will use the app to unlock a donation in this inaugural cause marketing campaign. By their own telling, Cars.com has worked diligently to ensure a good brand/nonprofit fit. Instead of simply looking at automotive-related organizations, the brand dug a bit deeper to identify “confidence” as their primary consumer emotion, then worked to find nonprofit organizations who also inspired confidence. As we saw last year with Groupon, incorporating a cause into the Super Bowl is not a sure bet but Cars.com has earned our props for bringing cause into the Shazam spotlight.
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