For Suzuki, crime does pay

Car makers are cashing in on the latest instalment of the Underbelly TV series on Channel Nine, which digs the dirt on the drug lords and crooked cops in Kings Cross in the 1990s.

The tale of terror and corruption is helping sell shiny new cars, including one that hasn't even been released yet.

Japanese car maker Suzuki, a small-car specialist and relative minnow in the automotive world, showed that it can punch above its weight, taking the prime timeslot in the first hour as the exclusive automotive brand.

Suzuki is understood to have a modest advertising budget of about $20 million annually, compared to market leader Toyota Australia's advertising budget of about $80 million, according to advertising industry data.

"If you're going to do anything, dominate it," says Tony Devers, the managing director of Suzuki Australia. Suzuki is running a teaser campaign for the brand's first ever mid-size sedan, the Kizashi, due in showrooms next month.

"Our strategy is to pick the top shows and put everything into that, rather than be on Judge Judy at 3 o'clock in the afternoon," he said.

"Media companies will try to con you and say you get better reach by spreading your spend across more time slots and more TV stations, but all they're doing is filling in the dead spots. They just want to fill the gaps."

Devers said the result of Suzuki's small but effective saturation made the brand look bigger than it is locally, where it represents a little more than 3 per cent of the new-car market.

"We seem to be bigger than we actually are because we're very targeted. This is the third time we've advertised during Underbelly. We've been involved in every series."

For the first episode of the new series, Suzuki had four advertisements plus a banner ad. It had exclusive automotive advertising rights for the first hour, but then Nine opened up the bidding for the second hour, during which Honda advertised the CR-V softroader.

Suzuki says that since the TV ads appeared it has received 1500 enquiries a day about the new car, and more than 350 test drives had been booked. Devers also said there were "countless" calls to dealerships to try to find out more about the new model.

The Kizashi, a medium-sized sedan designed to compete with such vehicles as the Toyota Camry, Mazda6 and Honda Accord Euro, is the largest car Suzuki has ever made. The name Kizashi, loosely translated, is Japanese for "something good is coming".

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