Automotive: See Dealer For Details

  • Engagement

    Multi-Brand + Multi-Dealer

  • Primary Media

    Paid Digital

  • Market

    Southern Ontario

  • Era

    Selected Archive

BUILT TO SPEC.

DESIGNED TO MOVE.

For a substantial part of my career, automotive advertising was one of the largest and most consistent areas of my commercial practice.

The work spanned dealerships across Southern Ontario and brands including Fiat, Chrysler, Jeep, RAM, General Motors, Cadillac, Jaguar and Land Rover.

Most campaigns were built around paid digital advertising, appearing across platforms and publications including Google, AutoTrader, Cineplex and the Toronto Star, with additional work extending into video editing, motion graphics and other promotional media.

The volume was substantial.

New vehicles. New incentives. New rates. New campaigns. New deadlines.

Then do it again.

And again.

For years.

PLEASE NOTE: Pricing, offers, promotions and product or service details shown in this portfolio reflect the original artwork at the time it was produced. They are presented for historical and creative context only and should not be considered current.

THE ART OF THE OFFER

Automotive advertising comes with rules.

Lots of them.

Depending on the manufacturer, campaigns were governed by comprehensive corporate standards covering everything from typography, colour and logo placement to vehicle imagery, offer presentation, legal copy and the relationship between dealership and manufacturer branding.

Some guidelines ran dozens of pages.

Then there was the offer itself.

Vehicle. Brand. Price. Payment. Rate. Incentive. Dealership. Call to action. Legal copy.

A considerable amount of information competing for a very small piece of screen.

And because inventory, incentives, rates and manufacturer programs changed constantly, the work moved quickly.

The challenge was finding enough room inside those systems to make the advertising distinctive, compliant and immediately understandable.

Different brands. Different rules. Different offers.

Same objective.

Move cars.

PUTTING IT IN MOTION

Static advertising represented most of the work, but the same campaigns increasingly moved into video and motion graphics. That introduced another layer of hierarchy: deciding not only what someone needed to see, but when they needed to see it.

Brand, vehicle, offer and call to action still had to survive.

They just had a timeline now.

A LOT OF CARS LATER...

Over the years, these campaigns supported the sale of thousands of vehicles across multiple dealerships, manufacturers and market conditions. Precisely attributing individual vehicle sales to individual pieces of advertising isn't particularly useful this many years later. What remains much easier to see is the scale and continuity of the work.

Campaign after campaign, month after month, the objective remained remarkably consistent:

Get the right vehicle, the right offer and the right message in front of the right audience.

Then get out of the way and let the dealership sell the car.

This collection represents a selected archive from that period of my career.

The vehicles have changed.

The offers have definitely changed.

The fundamentals haven’t.

For Context Yet, Completely Irrelevant

The first speeding ticket was issued in 1896. The driver was travelling at approximately 13 km/h. Absolute maniac.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere...

THE MOMENT OF CONTACT

Questions?
Comments?
Kudos?
A New Project?

Let's Talk

Have a project, an idea, a question, or an interesting problem that refuses to behave? Something that needs making, fixing, rethinking, photographing, designing, or otherwise coalescing into existence? Make contact. I can’t promise to say yes, but I can promise to have an opinion.

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