Answering a Competitor’s Killer Campaign

By Jeff Sexton, Wizard of Ads Partner

Ever won­der what hap­pened to Avis’s “We’re No. 2″ cam­paign?

I always assumed Avis fool­ishly dropped it out of bore­dom. Some brand man­ager wanted to put his “mark” on things and fool­ishly killed the goose that was lay­ing golden eggs. But that’s not nearly as inter­est­ing as what really happened…

See, a few years after Avis and Doyle Dane Bern­bach launched their leg­endary cam­paign, Hertz (aka No. 1) got ner­vous about how quickly Avis was gob­bling up their mar­ket share.  So Hertz got  wise and hired the other leg­endary cre­ative agency of the day: Ally & Gargano.

And here’s the counter-campaign that Carl Ally cre­ated for Hertz:

Hertz basi­cally took that “No. 2″ posi­tion and rammed it right up Avis’s arse, detail­ing point by point what cus­tomers give up when they rent cars from the smaller com­pany: loca­tions, car selec­tion, guar­an­teed per­for­mance, cus­tomer sup­port infra­struc­ture, etc.  And you gotta love that end­ing line: “No. 2 says he tries harder.  Than who?”

That counter-campaign went for the throat.  And the results show that it worked:

Click to read more… (You’ll be taken to Jeff’s site, “Jeff Sexton Writes”)