New VW Print Ads are Cute, But "Integrated" Campaign is Questionable

Every day last week in the Wall Street Journal I would see a small ad which pictured a classic Volkswagen Beetle with a microphone aimed at its trunk lid (the trunk being in the front).

Each ad had two lines of copy but nothing else — no company name, no URL, nada.

I kept seeing those ads and thinking, “Is it an ad for VW? An ad using a VW to communicate a message? What? Obviously they’re going to tell me the punch line at some point.”

The punch line arrived today in Section B1, Marketplace, page 3.

It’s a full page ad with copy that repeats the two lines of copy from the smaller ads run previously.

The final two lines read:

The people want a company willing to shake up the industry. Again.

It’s what the people want.

URL simply reads: vw.com

Logo copy reads: Das Auto.

Ok — are they releasing a new car? A new technology? What?

So I dutifully go to the Website and find an interactive poll that plays on social media and user-generated content – site visitors can write their own poll questions and others can vote on them. (Ok, that’s fun.)

The theme of the campaign obviously is, “It’s what the people want.”

But what exactly has VW done to “shake up the industry”?

And with Toyota now the number one car maker, what has VW done that makes people clamor for its cars?

You don’t really know until you look at the bottom of the page where it says, “VW Buzz” where you can click on scrolling news items about VW’s achievements. Click on one and you get taken to a press release (yawn).

I like the idea of the user generated poll questions, but I don’t get how the campaign components fit together — nor the campaign’s objective.

Also, this campaign would have been perfect online. I clicked around on the WSJ site but didn’t see any ads for VW. Hiding small ads in the print newspaper really doesn’t work — especially since VW’s target demographic (Gen Y?) is online and not reading print newspapers.

What do you think?