Your Shot: SEAT's Explosive Leon Cupra
A washing machine is an everyday item. Lola Barcelona is revving-up that ‘everyday’ nature in SEAT’s ‘Intensify the Everyday’ campaign, in which unlucky objects are wired to the brand’s most powerful engine. Its first piece of work for the brand, the Barcelona office of Lowe and Partners’ Spanish agency was actually set up in the wake of it winning the account in September. LBB’s Addison Capper caught up with the team to check out how they’re going to build on and evolve the brand’s strategy and find out some of the logistics behind connecting 280 monkeys to 280 horsepower.
LBB> Lola Barcelona was set up specifically to work on Seat - can you tell us a bit about the logistics of that? Why was it important to open up there?
Lola> SEAT is based in Barcelona, which helps to explain in large measure the brand’s heritage. In order to serve SEAT optimally and build a true partnership, we needed to be at Ground Zero in Barcelona - Martorell, actually.
LBB> This is Lola's first piece of work for the brand - what kind of conversations were had around the overall brand strategy?
Lola> During the pitch, we were asked to build on the existing brand strategy that reflects the automaker’s duality – i.e. a traditional Spanish brand enriched by the parent brand’s heritage in engineering.
LBB> And how do you see it evolving in the future?
Lola> Good question. Our challenge as SEAT’s global agency of record is not to discard all that preceded us, but rather to build on existing pillars. We need to execute the brand in communication better than has been done in the past, while evolving the brand as required.
LBB> The launch teaser films are a lot of fun - how much of them was actually shot and how much was done in post?
Lola> The explosions were real, but controlled as the engine did more damage, for example to the monkeys, in tests than we had expected. We had to limit its power so as not to destroy everything at the get go. In post production we added some minor effects, such as fire in the last scene and wrinkle removal from the actor’s face.
LBB> Where did the idea for the objects to be used initially come from?
Lola> We needed to demonstrate the power of the engine without actually showing the car because it wasn’t available at the time. We decided to connect the engine to a demonstration of pure power instead of connecting it to performance or speed which is what is usually done.
LBB> What was the reasoning behind the teaser films [there are now two more released], as opposed to diving straight into the integrated campaign?
Lola> With its 280hp the Cupra engine is the most powerful engine that SEAT has created. This much power needs to be ‘controlled’, and the car itself has been designed to channel this power. The spots are nothing more than a demonstration that no other machine can handle a Cupra 280hp engine. The obvious and didactic thing to do would have been to connect it to other cars, but we found a more fun way of doing it.
LBB> And what do these teaser films tell us about the tone we can expect in the future from SEAT?
Lola> This way of speaking is not the one in which SEAT normally speaks, as it is a brand for real people. The teasers may seem a little silly, but really they aren’t. In front of us we had the most extreme model in the portfolio that is for a special audience, so they make sense – but when you see how the brand continues to speak in the campaign you will realise that the jump in tone is not that great.
LBB> What were the biggest challenges during the building of this campaign and how did you overcome them?
Lola> The hardest part was obviously creating the explosions; although they were called ‘controlled explosions’ they were still explosions. Controlling explosions is different than working with an actor as you cannot tell a clapping monkey, "not bad, but please, when you explode, could you do it a little more slowly” or “not bad monkey, but could you please explode a little more to the right?” After each explosion we had to rebuild the entire set, which took a lot of time. It is true that nowadays you can do it in post-production to avoid those problems, but from the beginning we decided that it had to be real as we were only saying one thing about the car and wanted to speak the truth.
