Toyota Partners With Google Places For Geolocation-Centric Campaign

Toyota is launching a big campaign in an effort to draw attention to its Camry and Corolla brands by calling out to consumers in thousands of American cities.

A new series of banner ads from Toyota’s “Let’s Go Places” campaign will suggest local activities to consumers on mobile devices, such as visiting museums and restaurants. Toyota and Google Places teamed up to make the ads by creating a new API to pull location-specific data from over 15,000 U.S. cities to offer unique calls-to-action in the ads. For example, the ads may suggest museums in L.A. or restaurants in New York.

“We want to encourage our guests to find new places and experience life all around them,” said Jack Hollis, group vice president of marketing, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. “It is a new approach for Toyota, and we are very excited about it.”

The automaker is attempting to combat banner blindness by utilizing the power of location appeal, thereby drawing attention and clicks by referencing a user’s location in its ads.

“(The campaign) features several new digital elements in the Toyota playbook that are intended to encourage our customers to interact with the world immediately around them and to feel a different sense of (the brand) than they may have in the past,” explained Dionne Colvin-Lovely, director of traditional and new media for Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A.

To achieve its goal of serving up the right content to the right user, Toyota is using data based on consumer interests to create programmatic ads that feel completely personal.

“Across different platforms we can use data to target different consumers in different ways,” said Jason Schragger, chief creative officer at Saatchi LA, the agency behind the campaign. “If they’re into museums, we’ll serve them that. If they’re foodies, we’ll show them food. One of the really exciting things is working with personalizing programmatic so as it’s viewed, we’re able to put together the ads people really want to see. For example, our office is in Torrance (California). An ad for me would say, ‘There’s seven museums in Torrance.’ It’s about finding the right piece of data to find a really interesting piece of your city then take that curiosity and make it relevant.”

To ensure that its message remains aligned with user interests, the brand is A/B testing thousands of different combinations of ads to be certain the campaign continues to suggest activities that people truly want to hear about.

“We have so many measures (for the campaign),” explained Schragger. “Do people stop? Do they click the ad? We want the brand to shift to where it stands alone in a place where no other car brands are yet, so we have to dig in to that data and find the interest levels that make the most sense. For us, it’s all about getting the ads out into the market and testing them to be able to quickly change content. We may think people are most interested in the car’s exterior and have to change images when we find out it’s the interior. If people aren’t interested in restaurants, we may have to change it to lightbulbs.”

Toyota is also sponsoring a set of user-generated Snapchat Local Stories that will be targeted to viewers in relevant cities to further promote its geolocation-centric campaign.