Mercedes-Benz is a German luxury automaker whose name has been a benchmark for performance and prestige since the 1920s. In Canada, the brand sells its full passenger and performance lineup through Mercedes-Benz Canada, including the CLA, its entry point for first-time luxury buyers.
Company
Mercedes-Benz
Role
Art Director
Does anyone remember Vine?
Vine was a 6 second looping video app, launched in January 2013 and shut down by Twitter four years later. We made a series of Vines for the CLA launch.
Worth remembering what that actually meant. Everything happened inside the app, on a phone. No editing, no timeline, no undo. The stop-motion sequences were built by tapping record, moving the car, tapping again, one frame at a time. Get it wrong on frame 40 and you start over.
It took hours.
Project Overview
Younger buyers weren’t rejecting Mercedes-Benz. They had never pictured themselves in one. The brand was your grandfather’s car, something you earned late, after the career and the house. That perception was an existential problem rather than a marketing one. A brand that only sells to people at the end of their earning years has a shrinking customer base by definition.
Challenge
The CLA was Mercedes-Benz Canada’s entry point to a new generation, launching alongside a redesigned B-Class. It had to be smaller and more affordable without reading as lesser, and it had to speak to people who had never considered the brand without alienating the owners who already had. The standard luxury launch microsite, hero shot and spec sheet, would have confirmed exactly the perception we needed to break.
We built the Canadian launch site around a typographic system developed here in Toronto. Every section took an “Un-” word, a negation that doubled as the car’s argument. Unleash. Unmistakable. Unbound. Unparalleled. Unrivalled. It turned a product tour into a campaign and gave the car a voice that was confident instead of deferential. The design went nearly all black with a single electric cyan carrying every headline and every interactive cue, closer to a sneaker launch than a sedan brochure. Nine scrollable sections, an eight-colour in-browser configurator, English and French. The price appeared before anything else did.
The microsite anchored a national launch that also ran digital, social and test drive activations, and it drew significant media attention. The CLA went on to become Mercedes-Benz Canada’s volume leader among passenger cars.
