Lexus is Its Own Influencer in Winning Social Spot

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If there’s one thing social media users aren’t short of, it’s influencer videos. Spend any time on TikTok and you’ll see a dozen posts a day of people showcasing their beauty routines, their fashion, the tunes they get ready to and – naturally – a shout out to a brand or two along the way.

You might not expect a high-end automotive brand like Lexus to join the party. But you’d be wrong, as the newest social video ad for the Lexus ES features a brand new influencer – the ES itself, or at least a version of its onboard computer voice.

The ES delivers an entertaining parody of the standard influencer talk – name-dropping brands of windscreen wash and describing its matching bag when its driver puts one into the car’s boot. It’s all in aid of showcasing the car’s luxurious interior, smooth and silent running and top class tech, but the pastiche of short-form videos means this Lexus spot is more entertaining and individual than the standard social video ad.

That’s not just our opinion. We ran the ad through our Test Your Ad Social platform, which shows the long-term and short-term potential of any ad to contribute to brand growth. It also records the speed and accuracy of brand recognition, so you can be sure that potential isn’t being wasted by misattribution.

Lexus beats the norm across every dimension. The ad scores 3.5-Stars, which puts it into the top quintile of all social ads for long-term brand building potential (the average is a modest 2.3-Star Rating). It also gets a strong short-term Spike Rating, predicting this is a highly motivating ad for sales and enquiries. And it hits strong Brand Fluency – people recognising who the ad is for. Both Spike and Fluency are well over the social video norm.

So we know this is a strong ad. But we can dig deeper into the report for more diagnostics. There’s an early dip in attention as people with no interest in cars tune out, but after that there’s only a gentle decline in attention even though this ad lasts a full minute, a long time for social video.

We can find a possible reason for this by looking at the types of happiness recorded and the emotional response. Surprise is very high for a social video ad, and even though the ad is funny, it’s excitement, not amusement, which drives a lot of the response. The Lexus ES is a genuinely great looking product, in other words, and people are excited and surprised to learn more about it.

The other thing people know about Lexus is that it’s a premium model, so it’s not too surprising that “Expensive” tops the key associations in the report. But right behind that are a line of more positive associations – “Quality”, “Stylish” and “Modern” that confirm the ES is making a good impression.

The final chart that’s worth looking at is the demographic response, where we break down age and gender reactions to the ad. These scores are only indicative, as they’re based on smaller sample sizes, but they show the directions in which opinion is breaking. For Lexus, there’s good news – this ad for channels used by younger consumers, talking about an electric vehicle built to appeal to them, performs particularly well among 18-35 and 35-54 viewers, only dipping among older and more EV-resistant customers.

Lexus ad has its tongue firmly in its cheek – it knows it can’t beat influencer culture at its own game, and it would be embarrassing to try. But its lightly ironic approach has met its audience halfway and proved a winning tactic for a premium brand on social media.