Centraal Beheer built a machine that films professional car ads for private sellers

Stand out in the flood of online second-hand car listings and become top of mind with people buying a new car, by 'going the extra mile' for clients — helping them sell their own cars.

An insurer makes professional TV-style ads for people selling their used cars — and every seller's car ad doubles as an ad for the insurer.

A high-tech installation using projection mapping and Kinect offered three ad worlds — Luxury, Hollywood or Nature — projected by five video projectors and filmed by three automated cameras, with a voice-over artist on site. Sellers drove off with a finished ad in under a minute, registered via centraalbeheer.nl/autoreclame until 10 June.

The ads went onto car-selling sites and social media — the exact places buyers search — and into digital OOH, pre-rolls and banners; no results were reported. A follow-up event invited sellers into a studio to narrate their own radio spot on Centraal Beheer's airtime.

With more and more car owners selling their own cars online, Dutch insurer Centraal Beheer launched Car Commercial To Go in June 2018: a high-tech installation that created a personal, professional ad video for your car in less than a minute, built with DDB & Tribal Amsterdam.

Users picked one of three pre-created advertising worlds — Luxury, Hollywood or Nature — projected by five video projectors and recorded through three automated cameras, with a voice-over artist on site. Sellers placed the finished films on regular car-selling sites or social media, where they would catch buyers' attention and carry the message that Centraal Beheer is the most customer-friendly insurance company in the Netherlands.

The films also ran as digital OOH, pre-rolls and banners, and sellers could apply for a second event: recording their own car spot in a studio using Centraal Beheer's radio airtime. Registration ran until 10 June via centraalbeheer.nl/autoreclame, with the campaign live from 4 June through the end of June 2018.

Circular by design — as creative director Ed van Bennekom put it, Centraal Beheer creates car ads for private sellers, and those sellers in turn advertise its insurance.

Placement is the point: the insurer gets present 'in places where consumers are actually searching for their future car' instead of shouting beside them.

The brand promise ('we always go the extra mile for our clients') is demonstrated rather than claimed — the service IS the message.

Projection mapping plus Kinect made professional-grade ads manufacturable in bulk, so a TV-quality format could scale to ordinary second-hand sellers.

Media space can be manufactured: give your audience something genuinely useful and their output becomes your placement in the most relevant channel there is.

The campaign ran from 4 June through the end of June 2018, with a planned second event turning selected sellers' ads into self-narrated radio spots on Centraal Beheer's airtime. No usage or awareness results were published in the report.