Creativity in Collections - Motorwerks Marketing

Posted By
The Z260

Hi Friends!

When I first got into this industry, collector car marketing was boring. A neutral 3/4 shot of a car on grass, edited conservatively, with a white footer and black text was the norm. In virtually any car magazine that you opened around that time period, you would find page after page of this and not much else.

I pretty quickly learned that changing this was my meal ticket and if you recall the lead up to Monterey Car Week in 2014, with Russo and Steele’s campaign of 1960s and ’70s music festival poster inspired ads, we really went for it. These ads really came to life comparatively and other auction houses clearly noticed this and followed suit too. Things started to look much brighter, more lively and more interesting after that.

As social media has progressed, the minimum standard for marketing your vehicles has also risen considerably. Of course, the major auction houses have been at the forefront of this, with their huge budgets, list of dedicated and capable creative contractors (people like us) and their jaw dropping inventories that by itself jump off the screen (RM Sotheby’s recent social media spots with Top Gear’s Chris Harris and influencer Riley Harper immediately come to mind), but from a ground level perspective, nobody has pushed this forward further and harder than Bring-a-Trailer.

Virtually revitalizing expectations across the industry for what is acceptable from the perspective of classified ads, dealer website presentation and even awarding in-house and agency content creators via their annual awards, Bring-a-Trailer is consistently pushing new boundaries and helping to move this industry forward. This has also spawned off into some pretty interesting and strategically focused collection offerings too.

Obviously, branding car collections is nothing new, but BAT has continuously pushed dealers to put on their thinking caps and go out in the world and create things that can hit the web in a collective capacity, which definitely makes things way more interesting.

Several of their power sellers have jumped on this trend as well, but I don’t think anybody has really embraced it as thoroughly as Houston, Texas’s DriverSource. Offering multiple collections a year, they continuously come up with new and interesting ways to put out cars and they create fun and engaging marketing alongside these efforts.

This time, I think they’ve outdone themselves, however. The DS Legends collection, now live on the site, is a group of arcade and console inspired cars designed specifically to appeal to the video game enthusiast collectors. As many know, this is a fast-growing group, wherein for many, this is where most early interactions with collector cars now begin.

Initial marketing pieces included video game components as well as retro style sneakers (which we all know have become a very big deal with lots of car collectors), but for me the overall, packaging of the collection is what caught my attention. Well vetted, documented, high quality collector cars across the board, lucky auction winners also receive custom video game cases containing a digitized version of all vehicle records as well as a full media reel for each car that the new owner can use to show off their newly acquired treasures on social media. They also get branded clothing items featuring their new car with the retro style logo of the collection.

I personally love it when people think outside the box, I love that BAT has continuously fostered a culture that produces ideas like this and I’m excited to see where they go next with it.

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