I was recently looking at a local venue for who was coming to concert over the next few months, when an ad popped up for Pennzoil and lovelytheband. I’m a huge lovelytheband the band fan, so I follow the ad. It landed me on a Pennzoil Garage Session page with three YouTube videos sponsored by Pennzoil. So, I watch the video featuring lovelytheband and it starts with them discussing their first cars and what they toured in and then moves into a performance featuring their top hit “broken”. It was a very well curated video and a pleasure to watch. The other two videos were for Maddie and Tae (never heard of them) and Blackberry Smoke (I have heard of them, but they’re not on my regular playlist), they followed the same video format.
I was really intrigued by the Pennzoil campaign; it incorporated a lot of the marketing tactics we have discussed in class; affiliate marketing, YouTube videos, a branded landing page and cross collaboration with another brand not affiliated with motor oil – music, specifically Live Nation. Pennzoil and Live Nation partnered on these three videos for a 2019 Pennzoil Garage Session series. The summer series only featured three bands Blackberry Smoke, Maddie and Tae and lovelytheband. “[Each] episode of the Pennzoil Garage Sessions is intended to celebrate the intrinsic connection between cars and music and focus on our artists’ personal car stories.” (MediaPost, 2019) Bobby Baird, the North America marketing manager, stated “the Pennzoil Garage Sessions series will be shared across all of Pennzoil’s owned channels including our website (Pennzoil.com/music), Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Additionally, the video will be hosted via the Live Nation official YouTube channel.” (MediaPost, 2019) In the article from MediaPost there was no mention of paid channels, but I would assume since I saw this ad on one of Live Nation’s affiliate venue’s site that they also incorporated paid advertising into this campaign to drive traffic and cross promote the Garage Sessions from other Live Nation affiliates to their avid music fan base. I go to a lot of concert and use Live Nation quite a bit for ticket purchases, but I never saw any of the other ads over the summer, but that could be because I have no “known” association to those bands (Google knows all), but have searched for lovelythebad a few times. Curious to me that I only saw this ad at work, which is a male dominated industry in trucking, so it was curious to me that maybe the only reason I saw the ad was because I fit the target audience at work but when I was at home I tried to get the ad again but all I got was an RX opioid crisis ad…not really what I wanted. If this ad was specifically targeted to men, was there a missed opportunity for women to find this ad and connect with the brand on a different level? Since seeing this ad, I’ll be more aware of Pennzoil and what they sell at my local auto store and may be more likely to pick up their brand knowing they are supporting the music that I so very much love.
Even though I know Pennzoil will have more Garage sessions, did Pennzoil miss an opportunity with this campaign? Pennzoil never asked me to stay connected for next years session. They did have an Ultimate Fan sweepstakes, but that only ran for 3 months and closed out. So, Pennzoil only captured data for 3 months?? I get that the campaign only ran for the summer, but what about all the others that have since found the site? I think they’ve missed the mark to connect with an engaged audience. At a minimum ask me for my email to send me a notice for next years garage session or ask me to follow Pennzoil on social at a specific hashtag like #GarageSessions. They left me hanging, now I have to remember to find them next year instead of making it seamless for me to reconnect with them again not to mention exposing me to 3 new bands that I might not have known about.
Side thought, in looking at the link structure for the Pennzoil campaign I found it fascinating at how effectively Pennzoil used Google Analytics tracking to gain actionable metrics on their creative, https://www.pennzoil.com/en_us/latest/pennzoil-garage-sessions.html?utm_source=live-nation&utm_medium=display_banner&utm_content=live-nation_garage-sessions_LovelyTheBand_artist-alignment_na&utm_campaign=lubricants_us_us_2019pennzoil_PGS&dclid=CMn6uMfNreUCFWXE4Qod0loBBg#vanity-aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucGVubnpvaWwuY29tL211c2lj=true&iframe=L2Nsb3NlZA. Pennzoil can now identify exactly where a person came from, Live Nation, what medium they saw, display_banner, and what band video they saw in the ad that drove them to the landing page, lovelytheband. This is a great way to measure the effectiveness of the campaign as well as which band resonated with their target audience the most.
I may not be Pennzoil’s target market, but I will be looking out for their 2020 summer series and be curious as to which bands they’ll feature next year, even though they didn’t ask me to. Party on Wayne, Party on Garth!
Reference:
MediaPost, Pennzoil, Live Nation Launch Garage Sessions Series, Tanya Gazdik, June 4, 2019,
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/336625/pennzoil-live-nation-launch-garage-sessions-serie.html
Leave a Reply