Happy Birthday Interweb
The internet as we know it is 40 years old next week. October 29th 1969 was when the first two computers (one at Stanford, the other at UCLA) connected to each other. They were the first two “hosts”. At the end of the following year, there were 13 computers talking to each other and so it goes. The Guardian has a brilliant internet timeline, with milestones of each of the last 40 years. Glancing through it, it struck me how significant the pace of change has been in the last 10 or so years. Each year, something arguably massive emerges (1997 blogging, 1999 Napster, 2001, Wikipedia, 2004, Facebook, 2005, You Tube, 2006 Twitter). This brings us up to today and a story in AdAge announcing VW’s launch of the new Golf GTI - a car I once owned and absolutely loved. When the last version of the GTI was launched in 2006, VW spend $60 million on TV advertising. In 2009, they are launching the new GTI with an app only available on the iPhone, costing them about $500,000 to do it. I love this for a couple of reasons:
1. I’m guessing the correlation between iPhone ownership and VW brand love is pretty strong…so a decent partnership
2. Driving a GTI is like driving a toy car on steroids…a neat creative spin to promote the launch with a driving game
I also just want to see how it works out…what a brilliant case study if it does and a ballsy move by VW.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
And when was the iPhone launched? 2007? To extend your timeline of historic products by year… the iPhone would surely win for that year and again last year with the introduction of Aps??? (I could be a whole year off on this…)
December 6th, 2009 at 7:50 am
ah, creative and media contributing in sync to the execution. your point on correlation between iPhone owners and Vdub drivers will be the key to the success of more brands adopting this case study (surely will be tempting). important support for truly knowing one’s audience. now thinking on which brands might confidently approach this strategy. many have tied relevance to immediacy/convenience afforded by the iPhone, but that’s not a comparable strategy to VW.