Watch above or read below.

Matthew Burns:
Thank you for coming back and doing an episode. You actually said, Hey, I got a really good idea for a super ad that really kind of touched you at one point or other. You remembered it without. You didn’t have any recall on it. You were just like, Hey, I want to do an episode of Sticky Sales Stories. Oh, I had to do the Suburu ad. And you pulled that out of thin air and then you sent it to me and it was great. But it made me think of another ad because of completely two different styles of ad, both sticky story selling, both good ads, talking to the same consumer. So let’s do yours and then we’ll jump over to mine, the one that I remembered, and then we can talk about why they’re both great.

Dylan Bernier:
Let’s play the ad that I chose and then we’ll talk about it.

Man: Come on, come on. Come on.

Woman: Go make some friends.

Man: It’s so tough to give them a run in the city, but they really love it here. Be gentle, be gentle.

Woman: They’re making friends.

Woman 2: See the one that, well, it’s just going in circles.

Man: Yeah.

Woman 2: That’s mine. Oh, off, off, off!

Man: Come on, time to go.

Announcer: The 2020 Subaru Crosstrek.

Man: Come here. Now.

Announcer: It’s up for it.

Woman: Oh, no. Oh, there he goes.

Man: I just shampooed him this morning.

Matthew Burns:
Okay. So I think this is a brilliant ad. I mean, it’s funny. Why I like it so much and I think why it stuck to you is because everybody has a dog. Everybody knows somebody who has a dog. Everybody knows the dog experience. And this is what they did is they went, “Well, listen, we’ve got this new crossover vehicle that’s going to be awesome for city use.” But they’re known as, I mean, you said it as an outdoor company, as the granola lifestyle kind of…

Dylan Bernier:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
Now they’ve got this city car, but they want everybody to realize that the roots of the company are still in the vehicle, that it can go over the hills and over the bumps and it can take a beating and it has to run, which I think is a great way to think about the ad because that’s what we do with our dogs when we go to the dog park. So we’ve got the city experience, but the dogs get to go.

It’s funny because I like mystery in ads, but they could have been a little bit more heavy-handed with talking about the fact that, hey, this is a city. They didn’t really sell me that it’s a city vehicle besides one sort of throwaway line at the beginning of the ad, which with good repetition, we know, well eventually you’ll hear that line and go, oh, okay, this is for a city.

I get it. But talk to me, what stuck out about the ad with you?

Dylan Bernier:
I first saw this ad back when it ran in 2020 and I remember a fond memory of being at a movie theater and this was a pre-roll ad before the movie. I was sitting with my dad and him and I both had a chuckle over this ad because we’ve had a shared experience together over the fact that this reminds us of what it’s like to be a dog owner, right? You’re right. The ad itself doesn’t necessarily do an amazing job of explaining literally that it’s a city car. So transformation has to be assumed, but if you make the connection, it hits quite well, I think.

Our dogs are very domesticated. Most people, dogs stay inside the house. They go out. You have to take your dog out for a walk because they have a lot of energy and things like that. And so all the themes and metaphors that they played on in the ad definitely stand true to dog owners. And I think –

Matthew Burns:
Wait a second. I’ve got three dogs and we just got a new puppy. My son just picked up a dog. He wanted his own. So we got this puppy in the house and his nose is constantly in the butt of the other two dogs. And when it was, “Get off, get off,” that line, it made me laugh out loud watching it because the reverse camera was on. Talk about features and benefits. The reverse camera’s on and it shows the proximity of the car. So it’s showing that, but with the analogy of it’s trying to be friendly with the car in front of it, I though it was brilliantly done.

Dylan Bernier:
Imagine if your dogs were hanging out, goes to sniff the butt and it’s like beep, beep, beep, beep.

Matthew Burns:
So this is the thing, and we get to talk about all of these kind of emotional cues.

Dylan Bernier:
Because of that shared experience that I had with my dad, this ad has stood the test of time in my brain. And I consider myself as someone who has a fairly weak memory long term, especially when thinking of advertisements, which are meant to of course sell you something.

Matthew Burns:
Well, and think about how many ads do you get involved with. Listen, we’re Wizard of Ads Partners. What we do is create advertising for a living, which is why we talk about advertising for a living. And the fact that you get bombarded with the amount ads, this one, not done by one of us, we believe we’re probably the best writing team in the gig for creating emotional sticky ads. And then we’ve got Subaru that’s lodged itself firmly in your brain, right? So I mean that is a pretty good testament.

Dylan Bernier:
Especially for a car company. I think that you would probably tend to agree with me, Matt, but a lot of car commercials and car advertising is very repetitive. It’s very features and benefit kind of stuff.

Matthew Burns:
Features and benefit.

Dylan Bernier:
It’s just all features and benefit. And you and I both know every new car has the same features and the same benefits. They all have the nice interior with the nice leather seats. They all have all the fancy gadgets, gizmos and proximities, electronic systems and all the stuff. They all have it. They all have. And so trying to compete on features and benefits is a losing game at this point.

Matthew Burns:
Correct. No, but you said something right off the hop, which is this is an outdoor brand. This is for the adventure. This is for the people that are out there doing the thing. They got the skis strapped to the top. So what do they do? They play to their strengths. Hey, this is a city car, but we know we got to get out into the country to run our legs, right? Okay. So funny ad, well produced. There’s one other line I really wanted to say out loud, which was, I just had it washed. They got all dirty running around.

Dylan Bernier:
Or just shampooed, I think.

Matthew Burns:
Just shampooed it. Yeah. Right? So funny. Now, this is what I found. Watch this ad.

 

Announcer: The new 2017 Subaru Forester for all of life’s rallies.

Dylan Bernier:
Not a funny ad. Not funny at all.

Matthew Burns:
But it’s a great ad. And it’s speaking to the same consumer, believe it or not. Now, not the exact same one. The Crosstrek city owner, they were definitely going for a very specific consumer, but it’s still the consumer that wants to be able to go out and do bigger things, right?

Dylan Bernier:
Yeah.

Matthew Burns:
This one is set on a farm, but yet it just means… My favorite part is they did that whole ad. Not once did they say it can take a beating. Not once did it say it’s meant for this kind of use. Not once did it didn’t have to say any of those things. And it was a story of a puppy that got a lift back home because it was falling behind. That’s the story.

It’s a good human. A good human going, “Hey, listen buddy, you’ll win this one. You win this race.” And he gets there and he’s the first one eating his chow, right? But super well produced. And when I talked about mystery, we didn’t know what the ad was about until he got into his car. And even then, I don’t know that we really truly know that it was a car ad, right? Yeah. It could have been a puppy food ad. It could have been a whole bunch of other things.

Dylan Bernier:
Or something to do with farming or…

Matthew Burns:
The mystery held our attention all the way into it. So we had that kind of intriguing mystery, which I really like in advertising. Now, second time, third time you watch it, you’re watching it for different reasons because now you know what the end is. But I love the fact that, you know,”We have to put our name in the first 30 seconds or seven seconds of the ad.” And it’s like, no, you don’t. No, you don’t. Do something really interesting, buy the time and attention with some really good entertainment. But I want to talk about production value. This is what you do for a living. You’re a production guy. How hard is it to make these ads? There’s a pretty penny being spent here, no?

Dylan Bernier:
Having well-trained dogs on set are expensive, and especially puppies. They get tired faster. It’s harder to hold their attention. They’re less predictable and they’ve spent less time being trained, so they’re just more difficult to work with. I’ve worked with some of the best agility dogs in the world through some of the work that I’ve done in my career. It’s because you’re not just hiring the dog, you’re also hiring its trainer as well. The handler. The handler and the trainer. You mentioned to me off air, the puppy falling off the fence. I mean, that’s not something you can really stage. No.

Matthew Burns:
Right. And how long did you have to film? How much film, how much daylight did you burn to get the right. Because it wouldn’t have been that scene. They probably did 50 different things and then got the thing that they needed at the end was, okay, this is the most cute, this one that’s going to pull the heartstring the most. Because remember, we’re trying to move you emotionally in advertising. That’s the whole goal here is make you suck you in and keep you there till the end and make you feel something for the brand.

Dylan Bernier:
On a shoot like that, when you’re working with animals, you’re shooting a lot to try and capture any kind of organic thing that happens. Yeah, rolling down the hill may not have even been something that they scripted for. It may have just happened, but they’re like, “This camera is staying on that dog the whole time.”

Matthew Burns:
Crosstrek buyers and Forrester buyers are going to be subtly different, but they still have the same love for the brand. They believe the same things about the brand that they’re meant for outdoors, meant for doing the hard stuff. Be emotional, funny. The worst one is fear. Try not to use fear too much because it stops people from making decisions, but produce it well. Spend a couple of dollars to produce it well. You can get away with a well-produced ad that looks like it’s not well produced on purpose, but it still needs to well produced.

Dylan Bernier:
If you’re going for a certain look, sometimes even if it’s not a super high polished look, even that can be difficult to put together sometimes.

Matthew Burns:
Correct. That’s what I’m thinking. Anyway, so yeah. So guys, thank you so much for watching. This is a little bit longer episode, but we really wanted to highlight the difference between these two ads. One being a little bit funny, one being a little bit more emotional, but still talking to the same consumer. Keep coming up with ideas, man. This has been fun. I like doing this.

Dylan Bernier:
Yeah, this was fun. Thanks for having me back on and I look forward to being back again.

Matthew Burns:
Perfect. All right guys. Well, listen, we’ll see you on the next episode of Sticky Sales Stories.

Dylan Bernier:
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