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Now here's a car
you just gotta love

Attached to the car are sensors leading to a love meter

By Toni Fitzgerald
Oct 23, 2009

Admittedly, it sounds real corny. Put a new car on a busy street corner, hook it up to something called a love meter, and invite people to run their hands along the car.

When they do, the love meter goes bonkers. An arrow on the dial shoots over into the red zone, indicating true love.

That's not how you sell cars.

You sell cars by talking about their pickup, the size of the engine, how they can pass everyone else on a busy highway and even dodge the occasional deer that wanders into the road. (It always seems to be raining, but the driver deftly swings the wheel, missing the frightened deer by inches.)

Or that's how you sold cars before people stopped buying them.

In this alternative stunt for the 2010 Subaru Legacy, the aim, really a smart one, was to get people to interact with the car in an entirely different way, and it worked at that level, even if the stunt itself seemed goofy.

"What's neat about the love meter is that people interacted with the car in an engaging way, learning about things that are tough to market to people," says Kevin Mayer, director of marketing at Subaru.

Subaru knew it could deliver the right messages on fuel economy, horsepower and the like through traditional media like TV. It was looking for an out-of-home element that would convey the sensory experience of the Legacy, and it turned to its Minneapolis agency, Carmichael Lynch, for ideas. Several ideas were tossed about at the agency, and the love meter stuck.

The campaign took place last month in high-pedestrian areas of three different cities, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. TH Outdoor and Events and Posterscope helped produce the love meter.

The cars were attached to the love meter, which stood about 8 feet tall. At the top of the custom-made gadget was the actual meter, which looked like a speedometer, with the needle that moved from left to right. The extreme right was in red, intended to signify true amore.

Above the dial was the word "Love."

The sensors were hooked to different points on the car. When someone touched an area of the car with a sensor, it triggered the needle on love meter, and as you would expect the love meter flew into the red zone every time.

Each touch also prompted a blurb on the LED screen below the love meter that expounded on an aspect of the Legacy's safety, balance, performance or drive experience.

As you would also expect, once a passerby made the love meter shoot into the red zone, he or she just had to move about the car to trigger the other sensors. They tried out every single sensor to see what the love meter reaction would be, even if they'd just watched the person before them do the same thing.

Guards hired to keep watch over the cars also served as attendance takers. More than 750,000 people saw the car over the two weeks of the campaign, a number that pleased Subaru.

"We were really happy with the amount of people who saw it and the feedback we're receiving," Mayer said. "It did its job very well."

Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life.	© 2010 Media Life Magazine

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