Issue #126 - Cupra x Rosalía

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We are Simon Andrews and Anthony McGuire, two people who have been working in marketing, advertising, and media for decades.

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TikTok Case Study = Supra x Rosalía

Simon’s Take:

As TikTok goes mainstream for advertisers - the media argument becoming increasingly compelling - we see fewer people taking advantage of the key attributes of TikTok - participation.

But when we see a car brand leaning in with a competition, we have to take notice. 

Cupra from Spanish car manufacturer Seat have just 56k followers on TikTok and their organic feed is mostly car shots - with their race car in Monaco featuring recently. They are open to memes, with collaboration with Nicki Loczek (2.8m followers) on posts about Exponential Cupra and one of their drivers tried the #PhotoCropChallenge.

For the current ads they partnered with Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalia - who has 30m TikTok followers - and offered a chance to win a bespoke Cupra by reinterpreting her ABCDEFG song - showing in a TikTok what the words of the song mean for the viewer.

To qualify for the prize draw the TikTok needs to feature the hashtag, use the music track and follow Cupra_Official.

Ran as a Branded Mission the activity seems to have paid off; 1.3b views on #CupraxRosalia and 3000 videos using the music track.

Does it matter that the campaign doesn't feature much car porn? Usually car ads are full of product shots, but when all the cars look the same does that matter any more. 

Cupra chose to connect with potential customers through working with creators. Branded Missions are the format where Tik Tok connects brands with creators, reducing the pressure on Agencies and Brands. In this campaign Cupra collaborated with a range of influencers such as Julber, Kellyss Antonielli, Perri Kiely and Valee Andre. Few agencies could have found such a diverse set of partners and I believe we will see more brands choose this way to make the most of the platform and its talent; creators.

Anthony’s Take:

I hadn’t heard of the Cupra before this campaign. Upon further research, I learned that the car brand is a kind of sporty spinoff from SEAT, owned by parent company Volkswagen group. For a while, I worked on Volkswagen as a client back when I was on Facebook’s Global Partnerships team. When looking at a house of brands like Volkswagen, you would imagine that each individual car brand is geared towards a particular demographic.

Without knowing any of the specifics about Cupra, I would guess that the brand is going after a young, lively audience. I make this assessment based on Cupra’s choice of Rosalía as their brand ambassador on TikTok. As Simon pointed out, most luxury car brands (and car brands in general) use social media (and TikTok specifically) as an opportunity to showcase car porn. In the promotional videos of the Cupra x Rosalía campaign, you see a little bit of that, but it’s primarily a call-to-action for user generated content in the way that TikTok does well.

So taking a step back - who is Rosalía? In case you don’t know, the 30-year-old Barcelona-born singer is one fo the biggest artists in the world. With 44 million monthly listeners on Spotify and top songs with hundreds of millions of plays, Rosalía is a massive star. The winner or nominee of numerous awards, including Grammys, Rosalía is a blue chip musician at an international level whose appeal goes beyond just the Spanish-speaking world.

Examining the branded hashtag page, you can see instructions for people to remix their own version of her ABCDEFG song in order to get a chance to win a Cupra car. To me, the connection between Rosalía and the Cupra brand appears fairly tenuous, and the overall challenge seemed kind of vague. Looking at the different challenge entries, you see everyone from people dancing to random assortments of lifestyle clips. There’s not much consistency between each competition entry, which makes you question what this actually drives for the brand in terms of getting people excited about the actual car.

But maybe that’s the point? Maybe the point of a TikTok challenge goes beyond trying to imitate a certain dance and evolves into a broader canvas of just encouraging people to post whatever content they want in order to win a prize. And in the process of getting excited about a contest to interact with famous singer Rosalía, maybe developing an appreciation for the Cupra is more of an indirect byproduct.

Either way, the campaign has reached billions of views, a significant number of entries from people submitting videos, and likely driven brand awareness for the Cupra. As a contest running across different European countries and Mexico, this Latin-inspired campaign with a huge Spanish-speaking star should drive good results for this international car brand from Spain.

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