Audi: The man at the wheel

These days, Audi's agencies generate far more than just ads and web sites; since the launch of the Audi Channel in 2005, they underpin a major content operation designed to animate the brand on all kinds of platforms, and it is over this huge multimedia project that Duffy presides.

He bounds into the room, fresh from a "great" multi-agency meeting elsewhere in the Kingly Street offices of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) and full of enthusiasm for his combined account team, which includes representatives of BBH, GT, MediaCom and TV production company North One.

"We'll start with different ideas - so it might be a mailpack for something, or it might be a fantastic creative idea - and we'll look at how they begin to apply to other channels," says Duffy, outlining a typical meeting. "It requires a breadth of thinking from all the agencies that are involved; it takes that sort of working relationship where people are not channel-centric or media-centric in terms of their approach."

Melting pot

Audi's marketing increasingly calls for such a melting-pot of disciplines. The Audi Channel that forms its core was conceived by BBH, and while Duffy has only inherited it from his predecessor, Nigel Brotherton, his task remains an ambitious one: to carry the investment and the content from a relatively straightforward TV property out across Audi's entire communications plan and into new areas.

Over recent months, as the programming that furnishes that channel has seeped increasingly from TV into internet and mobile, something that could previously have been construed as an act of great corporate narcissism begins to make more conventional sense.

"It gives us a base of content," says Duffy. "It gives us an approach which is all about how you describe our story in the most compelling way. It is incumbent on the organisation, on the marketing team, to make their content sufficiently compelling that the consumer can actually have that richer experience."

In July, the Audi Channel gained a window on Freeview via Top Up TV and in September it found distribution with IPTV service Joost, which now hosts ten hours of Audi content, and Nokia's N-series phones, which offer downloadable clips.

In the New Year, the channel strategy will broaden still further with the launch of an iPlayer-ish Audi media player in quarter one and a dedicated site for Audi owners in quarter two.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Audi Channel - which used to be found only on the Audi site or on Sky channel 884, between Psychic TV and Open Access - it is a channel obliged by its licence to focus purely on the Audi brand, which it does, 24 hours a day, with regular input from celebrity friends.

Nitty gritty

If you want to see how Rageh Omar gets on with the Audi Q7 on a particularly tricky test track, or hear from celebrity Audi owners such as Bryan Ferry and Beverley Knight, the Audi Channel is the one to watch. Perhaps more to the point, it is required viewing for those who are looking for feature-by-feature tours of new models or insights into every stage of the Audi design and construction processes.

Audi was the first company to be granted a self-promotional broadcast licence by Ofcom, and it remains one of very few to have gone to those lengths, with much more still to come.

"One of the interesting things about this project is that it is a truly digital project, but it is not a digital advertising project, it is a digital media project," says BBH head of content, Mark Boyd, who first dreamed the channel up.

The official line is that the channel has been an unequivocal success in its aims of both retention and recruitment. The fact that Duffy has continued to write the cheques since his arrival from Barclays a little over six months ago suggests that Audi has no regrets at taking such a major punt on the project.

"The channel is still one of the biggest global content projects around, and the fact that it is going into its third year, when understandably it is a big financial commitment, just demonstrates the kind of success it has had," says Boyd.

"Peter is a really savvy marketer and it is his role to question everything. He was certainly extremely challenging with the channel and the role that it played, and there was some further research and so on, but he is a tremendous advocate of it."

From Duffy's own perspective, the channel works as both " a head and heart thing", just as it should. "Clearly, internet is going to go much more down a route of interactive, video-based content, rather than a sit-forward-and-read-type format," he says. "Our work with the Audi Channel, where we are developing significant quantities of content to feed the TV channel, gives us fantastic experience in terms of how to communicate our product in that way.

"It's not like advertising promotional content, which a lot of organisations have experience in - it's about user guides; it's about different twists on product features; it's about just talking to the consumer in such a way that they can easily digest your content. That, for me, is the 'heart' thing that is so right about the Audi Channel."

No worthwhile marketing boss is ruled exclusively by his heart, of course, least of all one whose previous role was as Barclays' director of marketing services. Duffy also spent time as director of internet banking, launching Barclays' pioneering service in 1998, and as head of screen banking, where he introduced and later scrapped ATM charges.

Colleagues attest to the sharpness of the Duffy brain and its owner's unfailing eye for accountable value. Duffy is cagey with his figures in this regard, but he is happy to share the methodology that helps his head to follow his heart where the Audi Channel is concerned.

"My philosophy is: how much does it cost as a total percentage of the marketing budget, and then what is it doing in terms of sales and as a loyalty tool. When the consumer is looking around the range, trying to decide what model to buy, they certainly do come to the channel and they use it as part of the information-gathering phase. With the fact that it is so easily digestible, and the way it is produced, it does become influential for them in their buying decision."

Different strokes

More than ever, the principle of Audi's strategy is to produce strata of content that appeal in varying degrees to different types of Audi consumer.

For the prospective buyer, the channel and the web site, including numerous spin-off microsites, offer research material with which they can arm themselves in preparation for the day they walk into a dealership. For the new owner, a sales pack gathers together all the content that covers their model.

And then, for the Audi fanatic, there is much more. "If you look at (new, high-end performance car) the R8, we have got this beautiful piece of film shot by Olivier Gondry that whets the appetite. And then we have created this site with multiple layers for those who just want to admire the car to those who want to go deeper and understand individual engine configurations."

Those who are immune to the charms of prestige cars and sceptical about the value of such content ought to know that there are plenty who feel very differently. "It was interesting to see that, just two days after we released the R8 TV ad, 12,000 people had viewed it on YouTube," says Duffy. "It is an interesting phenomenon when you release your content and you let consumers receive it in a way that is most appropriate for them."

Coming from a huge but, let's face it, rather functional brand such as Barclays, Duffy says it has been the sheer depth of consumer enthusiasm for Audi that has taken him by surprise. "What has amazed me, coming into automotive, is the consumers' desire to interact with the brand," he says. "They want content; they want to understand our products and how they work. There is just a real demand to learn about Audi and the cars we produce. And that is perfectly understandable - they are amazingly exciting."

The fact that relatively few companies have followed Audi into this particularly prestige section of the branded-content market might suggest that few brands command the type of loyalty to justify it. Then again, it might be a reflection of the cost of running your own TV station and all-round content hub.

For his part, Duffy cares little for preserving Audi's first-mover advantage and believes any number of brands could potentially benefit from a similar approach.

"I think the knack for any marketing director is to identify what is going to excite a consumer about their brand," he says. "Whether it is the right thing for every brand or not, I don't know. You can imagine that it applies to holidays; it applies in different ways to different industries. How you would do it in each case would probably be very different, but certainly the consumer's appetite for our content is clearly there."

Up to now, the Audi Channel has essentially been a television-driven concept that employs other media for heightened effect. In future, things could soon start to change a great deal. GT has a brief to investigate new methods of distribution, with the aim of providing a better experience both for the non-Sky-subscribing mass market and for the Audi obsessive, starting with the media player and moving on to the online owners' portal.

"If you think historically, the channel has always lived on the Sky platform, and the content has been quite traditional in some respects," says GT group account director Giles McCormack. "Moving more into the digital space, it gives us a far freer rein from a creative perspective.

"There is only so much you can do with fast cars on a TV platform, and the same applies to TV advertising. In the digital space, there aren't so many rules and regulations, and that opens several doors for us, and for BBH. We can start making some really exciting content that we wouldn't be able to show on TV."

As part of this push into online territory, GT is building a database of content configured for devices that aren't even on the Audi map yet, from iPods to PSPs. "It is a massive piece of work," says McCormack.

The result could easily see Audi content on many more platforms for 2008 than those already officially announced, and Duffy is happy to be managing this explosion outwards from the brand's television base. "I don't think you can be unitary in your description of a future media landscape," he says. "It is going to fragment and the consumer is going to go in through one, two, three channels - whatever suits them."

Prestige

All the while, the imperative is to ensure the experience is an Audi one and that the prestige quality inherent in the brand and its engineering translates to every platform on which the marque is active.

Duffy sees that particular aim as "a given, rather than a challenge. It is something we constantly measure ourselves against: how does this feel, is it prestige? We need to make sure that all our actions, all our content, supports that and adds up to that."

And for those who might imagine that Audi might be somehow stretching its product thin with so much self-promotion, Duffy says the problem is actually the reverse.

"Our issue is not actually a limited amount of content, it is a question of how we tell all these stories," says Duffy. "If you look at the cars we have released this year and the plans we have announced already for next year, we are going through a phenomenal phase of bringing new models to market - it is literally release after release after release." And that is the beauty of online - that it offers fresh scope for a brand with more ambition than one dedicated television channel was ever really going to be able to contain.

PETER DUFFY CV
2007: Head of marketing, Audi UK
2005: Marketing services director, Barclays Bank
2003: Group insight director, Barclays Bank
1998: Online banking director, Barclays Bank