FIAT

Fiat uses local media to target new business audience.

In Autumn 2007, Fiat introduced a new commercial vehicle to the market and wanted to shift their ‘target audience’ from ‘White Van Man’ to actual business specifiers who make or contribute to a company’s purchasing decisions.

The Solution

From research we knew that:

75% of SMEs keep their purchasing decisions local

our daily newspapers reach c70% of business people across a week

that the UK business community considers regional press to be the most useful for local business news by a huge margin (compared to trade magazines and national press)

Northcliffe Media's local newspaper and online brands publish dedicated local business sections that are a perfect platform for targeting local business communities and therefore Starcom Mediavest developed an advertising campaign for Fiat that utilised:

24 paid newspapers (both daily and weekly)

17 geo-targeted ‘this is’ websites

The campaign which ran originally across Northcliffe's local multimedia brands in August/September 2007 was so successful that Fiat repeated it in August/September 2008.

Here's how Laura Nixon from Starcom Mediavest summed up the campaign:

"We knew that most decisions in vehicle acquisition are made online but it was vital for us to communicate to the relevant people, in the relevant environment through more traditional channels in order to drive them online. As frequency of exposure is proven to maximize the efficiency of advertising, it's a definite bonus to us that a similar audience, if not the same individuals, were exposed to the brand through more than one medium."