Kia Draws On Customer Reviews To Kickstart 2014 TV Campaign

LONDON – Jan 10, 2014: Following on from the phenomenal success of the 2013 ‘Customer Advocacy and Reviews Strategy’ (CARS) advertising, Kia Motors (UK) Ltd is starting 2014 with a fully integrated marketing campaign highlighting real customers comments and thoughts about their cars.

Now in its second year, Kia have published over 10,000 unfiltered, independently-verified reviews by Reevoo on their UK website www.kia.co.uk, with an average score of 9 out of 10 across their range of cars. The new campaign, aims to demonstrate just how much Kia owners actually love their cars by taking inspiration directly from customer written reviews.

The first TV commercial to air is for the revised 2014 Sportage – Kia’s successful C-segment crossover – launching on Thursday with coverage starting on ITV at 19:15 in Emmerdale, E4 at 20:40 in The Big Bang Theory and Channel 4 at 21:15 in the hit documentary The Undateables.

This will be followed closely by three 30 second adverts each featuring a Kia model - the Kia cee’d, Rio and Picanto. They are scheduled to be aired from the 23 January with the full TV campaign running till the end of March. Heavyweight press and digital campaigns will support the TV advertising during this time.

Mark Hopkins, Marketing Director, Kia Motors (UK) Ltd, said: “The importance of being honest and transparent is crucial to our continued business success. In 2013, we built the foundations for using customer reviews to help demonstrate how good our range of cars is and have found through these reviews how extremely passionate our customers are about their cars”.

The creative for the commercials was developed by John Crozier & Dom Sweeney at Innocean Worldwide UK, with the directing by Noah Harris through Blink Ink, with extensive CG work by Nineteen Twenty. The TV commercials are brought to life by filming hand-written reviews going onto Post-itŪ notes, to illustrate clearly what customers are saying about the Kia they own, before the images then expand to reveal a huge time-lapse animation of Post-itŪ notes surrounding the car.

The scale of the number of post-it notes used demonstrates the large number of customers who have now reviewed their Kias whilst also helping to dramatise the product benefits relevant to each model’s target audience. The voiceover uses words directly from customer reviews.