Four Brands Enter The Ring, One URL Leaves

Here's an interesting tact in getting folks to your microsite: the unfinished print ad.

Perhaps taking a page from the original Infiniti campaign, Hyundai does not feature any of its cars in their new print advertising. They even left out half of the copy, which cuts off mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, though they manage to bodyslam BMW, Honda and Toyota. To finish reading it, you have to head on over to a microsite with the unbranded URL of think-about-it.com.

Over at the site, you'll be hard-pressed to find any images of Hyundais there either. Need to see one? Check out one of the two commercials in the Safety section to see what one looks like.

Here, Go to Somebody Else's Website

Name me one client that wants to spend their advertising budget on creating print that drives consumers to other companies' websites. Okay, you got me: Perrier. "Show Me Perrier" is basically a "site-of-the-day" website centered around several themes: crazier, riskier, heavier, etc. Each print ad in this campaign showcases one of these theme, and gives each its own URL. On top of that, Perrier allowed its logo to be mussed with, even reducing their own name to a much smaller font size.

Does this campaign hold water? Can't say, but it's sure selling it. According to Perrier, it "increased sales more than 10%, driving revenue past $100 million for the first time since 1989."

Can You Back The Smack?

ESPN realizes even the most intense sports nuts won't sit on the couch glued to the TV all day long. So they created a Fantasy Football League. And instead of just doing an interactive banner campaign to promote it, they included print in their media buy. The result: "their website scored a 48% increase in total number of unique registrants, exceeding all pre-campaign goals."

Kicking Asphalt and Making Names

Buzz Saw Grinder? That's just the action star name given to me by the name generator at Mini Cooper's Hammer and Coop site. There you'll also find several webisodes that answer the question: what if Knight Rider was filmed in the '70s? An extensive integrated campaign was launched to promote this site: from appearances in Second Life to videos on YouTube, from movie trailers in 1900 theaters to fashion spreads in Rolling Stone. Oh, and a print campaign that doesn't think it's a print campaign, including a movie poster and an autographed pix with the URL posted on the back.

Ultimate Driving-to-Web Experience

Before there was Hammer & Coop, there was The Hire. This innovated effort, created for BMW (Mini Cooper's parent company), shifted the way people viewed online films. Produced some years ago, BMW Films won numerous awards and had over 100 million film views. That year, BMW sales increased by 12.5% , surpassing the 200,000 mark for the first time in its history. What's funny is that this all came about when BMW had no new car to promote but still wanted to do a branding effort. The print effort, besides a faux movie poster, included a comic book mini series published by Dark Horse.

URL's are in Fashion Now

Thumb through Vogue or Elle and you'll see dozens upon dozens of fashion ads, half of which feature no URL. The other half, however, do, even if they only lead to their manufactuers' sites and not to distinctive interactive experiences (which is what this blog is about). But I do feel the need to quickly touch upon this growing trend of URL's as headlines.

The urban clothesmaker, Encye, is taking a schizoid approach to its print campaign. One ad typically features a model, Encye's logo and a URL underneath it. In another magazine, you can find the same exact ad, only sans URL. Go figure. Fluevog shoes, on the other hand, uses only their URL. No headline, no logo, no nothing except for the URL. Unlike the two above, Urban Outfitters don't even bother showing any clothing. Just some mood photography and oh, a great big honkin' URL.

Tennis Anyone?

To promote their new digital sound projectors, Yamaha created a simple video to demonstrate what they call "multi-channel surround sound enjoyment". And since sound waves are invisible, they showed a guy being pelted by dozens of tennis balls instead. Now this video (and another one featuring bats) could have just languished on their site (and of course, YouTube). But Yamaha decided to use print to turn people's heads and get them to view the demo.