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Volkswagen Is World’s Best Creative Advertiser in 2018

In recent years, a scandal of huge proportions hit the world’s automotive industry, after news of questionable practices in emission testing and reporting broke. Called by the media Dieselgate, the scandal had at its center German manufacturer Volkswagen.
Volkswagen claims top advertiser title 1 photo
Photo: Volkswagen via guysgab.com
One would have thought such revelations, combined with later ones that proved bad practices included animal and human experiments might have at least dented the reputation of the said carmaker and drive its sales numbers into the negative.

That didn’t happen. In 2017, Volkswagen as a group sold some 10.7 million cars, beating Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi or Toyota, depeding on who's counting, and in effect becoming the biggest player in the industry. How?

What Volkswagen had during these troubled times are an excellent public relations and marketing departments. And as the saying goes, “there is no such thing as bad publicity,” especially when you have professionals trying to repair the damage.

On Monday, Volkswagen was declared by the annual ranking of the most successful creative advertising campaigns of the year, Gunn 100, as the World’s Best Creative Advertiser. It is the single automaker included in the top 10 list of best advertisers of 2017, which also lists, in order, Mars, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Ikea, Samsung, Heineken, The Carlyle Group, Alphabet and Restaurant Brands International.

The achievement is even more impressive as this is the first time Gunn Report has ranked advertisers as well as brands. The VW group also had two of its names included in the Top 10 brand list, Volkswagen and Audi. These are the only two automotive brands that made it in the top 10.

The ranking reported by Gunn 100 is quite comprehensive and includes performance data from 40 of the most important global, regional and local creative competitions.

So, there you have it. With the right kind of people in the right sort of place, you can turn even your worst corporate nightmare into a success story.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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