At the beginning of ’08, Audi came out with a beautiful new mini site to showcase its models. A relatively simple web site, Truth in Engineering maintains the emphasis on the car models themselves through a well placed sub-navigational bar at the bottom of the page, which, when the cursor is dragged across, has the rollover effect of bringing images of the models to the forefront. But this sub-navigational bar is subtle enough that it allows the more entertaining aspect of the page- namely the video content- to take center stage.
The mini site also allows for additional exposure for Audi’s recent Television campaigns- one TV Ad, shown on the site and on TV (including some not-too-cheap Olympics placements) is entitled “Truth in Progress.” This Ad does a great job of representing the brand image that Audi is trying to portray these days: one of luxury, style, and top-of-class excellence. And the commercial is anything but bashful in the way that it comparatively shows ‘the old paradigm of these values’- Mercedes, and ‘the new one’- Audi.
Audi even takes a stab at humor with its “Truth in the Godfather” Ad, which parodies the timeless scene in the Godfather where the record studio guy wakes up with a horse’s head in his bed…which is Corleone’s apparent solution for when his statement “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Except in this Ad…it’s not a horse head- it’s another strong brand name that Audi wants to show as dead…or dying, and being trampled overfoot by Audi.
Also notable on the advertainment side of things is another video on the site which is a cross-promotion for the movie Iron Man- where Audi has some obvious product placement interests.
The site itself is sleek, classy, and very well designed- which brings up the point that the site does a spectacular job of maintaining the overall look and feel of the Audi brand. This speaks to the fact that a web site, even a specialized mini site such as this one, is a virtual proxy for the brand itself. As such, this site fits well into Audi’s integrated marketing communications goals.
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