December 17, 20205 min read

EDO’s Winter Sales Event Report 12/18: Luxury Automakers

As the year comes to a close, automakers have primarily shifted their national TV advertising to focus on their winter sales events. Sales event creatives began to appear in November and continued to debut after Black Friday. Given December has the highest sales volume of the year for autos and sees some of the highest TV ad spending, there is no time to waste to maximize your campaign’s efficacy with just a few weeks left to hit 2020 sales targets.

This report contains brand and campaign-level performance data for luxury automakers’ Winter Sales Event advertising on national TV since November 26, 2020. The color-coding in the table below shows how campaigns are performing compared to the industry average.

EDO can help you make live creative rotation optimizations for your brand to drive more consumer engagement during this critical sales period.

WSE Campaign Overview

Search Engagement Volume (SEV) represents the increase in online search for a brand or product above the expected baseline in the minutes following a TV ad airing.

Search Engagement Rate (SER), indicated by color-coding above, controls for both audience size and ad duration, enabling an apples-to-apples comparison of the effectiveness of each brand’s TV campaign.

Since last week’s report, Lincoln (#1) drove past Lexus (#2) in Total SEV as the brand amassed over 500M additional impressions in the past week. Lincoln has nearly doubled its Total SEV from the same sales event period last year.
Lexus (#2) has maintained the most robust WSE campaign in terms of total airings, number of creatives, and use of both :15s and :30s spots.
Though Acura (#10) has run the smallest WSE campaign in the industry so far, and has similarly driven the lowest Total SEV, it’s worth noting the brand’s 413 Season of Performance Sales Event airings have been highly effective at driving Search Engagement on a per-person, per-second basis, as indicated by SER color-coding above.

Creative Performance

Lexus currently is using 12 active variations of Driveway Moments in its WSE campaign. Top-performer 2020 December to Remember SE – Driveway Moments (IS 300 Offer) :15 has performed 58% better than the lowest-performing Lexus spot, 2020 December to Remember SE – Driveway Moments (Happy Birthday) :15.
A consumer that viewed the Acura :15s RDX Offer has been 12% more likely to search for Acura in the minutes following an airing than someone who viewed the MDX Offer.
Of the two spots for the BMW Road Home Sales Event, there is a clear winner so far: 2020 Road Home SE – Light Your Way Home (Offer). Someone who viewed that spot has been 10% more likely to immediately engage online with BMW than someone who viewed 2020 Road Home SE – Celebrate The Journey Home (Offer).
The sole Lincoln Wish List SE creative, 2020 Wish List SE – Holiday Mayhem (Offer), is back from last year’s campaign and has seen an impressive 1.3B impressions so far this season – nearly 3x as many as the next most-aired Winter Sales Event spot across the Luxury industry.

WSE Creative Tracker

Lexus

Lincoln

2020 Wish List SE – Holiday Mayhem (Offer)
1,314.8M Impressions, 1,371 Airings

Mercedes-Benz

2021 Winter SE – Truck Toy (GLA 250 SUV Lease)
111 SER, 335.3M Impressions, 496 Airings
2021 Winter SE – Glow Bright (GLC 300 SUV Lease)
94 SER, 303.0M Impressions, 398 Airings
2021 Winter SE – Glow Bright (GLC 300 SUV Lease + APR)
46 SER, 13.5M Impressions, 55 Airings

For each advertiser, SER Index is benchmarked separately so that the average SER Index across all airings represented for the advertiser is 100. SER was not calculated for creatives with airing counts under 20.

EDO’s Winter Sales Event Report 12/18: Luxury Automakers

WSE Campaign Overview

Creative Performance

WSE Creative Tracker

Acura

Alfa Romeo

Audi

BMW

Cadillac

Jaguar

Land Rover

Lexus

Lincoln

Mercedes-Benz

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