10:48 am, January 19, 2018
IT’S a social media campaign with a difference – and one that has generated a lot of publicity for a Devon car dealership.
The Professional Car Agent, based in the Plymouth suburb of Plympton, hired the services of celebrity lookalike Tim Oliver to make a series of videos to be shared across the company’s social media outlets.
Oliver bears an uncanny resemblance to comedian Ricky Gervais and Gervais’s comic creation David Brent from the hit BBC TV ‘mockumentary’ sitcom The Office.
He dropped in at the dealership recently for a four-hour session, during which the videos were planned and filmed. Two of the sequences have been made live on Facebook and YouTube, with more to come – and they’ve certainly attracted plenty of attention.
Company director Darren Coles told Car Dealer Magazine this morning: ‘The videos have generated a huge response. On Facebook now, they have had 20,000 views and the figure is going up all the time. We’ve even had national papers call us over the last couple of days.
‘Obviously people are liking it but we didn’t expect it to be like that – we just thought we would attract some attention locally and that it would be quite funny but it’s just exploded!’
Coles explained that his business partner Matt Stott got hold of Oliver on LinkedIn ‘and then it just went from there’.
He added: ‘The reason why we did it is because we’re in an office environment – we’ve got the showroom, we’ve obviously got the sales people in here. We thought it would go well because obviously the David Brent comedy was called The Office. We just thought it would be perfect to do it here because people would be able to relate to it.’
The Professional Car Agent was set up by Stott and Coles in 2014 and sells a wide range of hand-picked used vehicles. New cars and vans are also available, and the company provides a car-selling service to customers as well.
Oliver is a full-time impersonator with several TV appearances under his belt. Watch his antics with The Professional Car Agent team here…
MORE: Half of car dealers ‘could disappear by 2025’
MORE: Volkswagen delivers more vehicles than ever before in 2017
MORE: Tootle starts advertising on Channel 4 after investment deal agreed
On Workshop Magazine: Don’t forget the rear wiper blades, Trico tells technicians
