Dale Jr. Endorsement for Camaro Contest Falls Short

We’ve written in past posts about how critical activation is when brands decide to use celebrities as endorsers, in addition to how important it is to fully leverage the valuable asset (the celeb endorser) that the brand has paid so dearly for to help sell its product.  GM enlisted Dale Earnhardt Jr. for a contest called Win Dale Jr’s. Camaro.  Sounds exciting, and I can imagine millions of people getting excited about winning a new Camaro that belongs to Dale Jr., or has Dale Jr. detailing, or anything to that effect. 

Home Page for "Win Dale Jr.'s Camaro" Website

The first problem when clicking on the banner I saw in www.espn.comis that when I get to the contest site, there’s nothing that tells me that this is Dale Jr.’s Camaro, or has ever had anything to do with Dale Jr.  From what I can tell, I’m gong to enter a contest to win a new Camaro, but the Camaro has nothing at all to do with Dale Jr. 

Winning a new Camaro is a nice prize to be sure, but I’m supposed to have a chance to win Dale Jr.’s Camaro, right?  This does belong to him or did at one time didn’t it?  There’s some sort of great, exciting story about this being Dale’s car, right?   Dale Jr. is going to pop up in a video and give a really cool tour of his car and talk about how lucky some fan is going to be to drive the car that he owns, isn’t he?  Who better to tell me how great the new Camaro is, particularly since he’s an owner, right? 

If GM is going to pay the price to have Dale Jr. lure people into entering the contest, and they name the contest “Win Dale Jr.’s Camaro,” there needs to be something there that tells me that this is indeed his car, and there should be a great story about it to keep me there and tell me about how great this new car is.  If GM only paid for his likeness and couldn’t use his voice or shoot him for a video, they still need to tell the story about this being his car. 

Contest page

As for the contest itself, you need to answer three questions of which you would find the answer by going to different sections of the Camaro site, but actually you just need to click on the choices and you can get to the correct answer easily enough without going through the site to look for the answers.   After I enter, it would be great to get a personal message from Dale Jr. himself in my inbox wishing me good luck and then telling me to go watch a video of him in his Camaro, thereby extending my engagement with Camaro.  You guessed it, didn’t happen.

The reasons a brand chooses a celeb endorser, athlete or otherwise, are primarily to increase the chances for people to engage with the brand and to make that engagement richer than it would be without the endorser.  This could have been a very rich, deep engagement and GM just completely blew the tranny on this one.  Once again, one of the key questions after you’ve paid for an endorser for your brand is, “what else can we do?”   Now that we have this person that we know millions of people are attracted to, how can we leverage that person’s brand so that people will have a deep, emotional and memorable engagement with our brand?  What are all of the ways we can give the consumer a rich experience by using this endorser?  The list goes on.  Unfortunately, either GM, their agency or both stopped asking questions after Dale Jr. was secured.  They simply went and made a contest website.  Bummer, for them and for the consumer.