• by Kate Kaye , January 7, 2003

Imagine consumers actually requesting a telemarketing call. Now imagine them requesting it through an online ad. A Titanic feat? Not for the Discovery Channel.

The mission was simple: get people, mainly males between the ages of 25-54, to tune-in to Discovery’s special feature, James Cameron's Expedition Bismarck. To do so, Discovery worked with itraffic, a subsidiary of Agency.com, to create an online campaign that ran from December 5th through the 8th in conjunction with other media components.

Web creative paralleled the exploration theme of James Cameron's Expedition Bismarck, which focused on debunking the myths surrounding the sinking of the legendary German battleship. In developing various ad units, itraffic took a “cinematic” approach, employing large formats such as a 728x90 banner and a Salon.com exclusive, the Ultramercial unit which runs before a user can view otherwise subscriber-only content.

“Specifically in TV and the Internet, in a world with a lot of clutter, the goal is to stand out,” comments Dan Stanton, creative director at Discovery.

itraffic placed ads on sites that created the most value, including Salon.com, Hollywood.com, About.com’s history section, FamilyFun.com and Zap2it.com. Offline components included television spots running on The Learning Channel, Animal Planet and Travel Channel, as well print ads, an in-theater movie trailer and outdoor ads.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of the campaign, an interactive 728x90 unit, enabled users to input their phone numbers directly in the ad which prompted a one-time phone call reminder from James Cameron himself to watch the show.

“We thought people would get the message and hang up right away,” admits Nicole Mansdorf, account manager at itraffic, “but the average duration of calls was close to the length of the actual message [57-seconds]. The offer of the phone call and the lure of James Cameron was a great hook.”

Another creative featured a countdown clock. The copy, “The truth that lies 16,000 feet below is coming to the surface in…” was followed by a continuously changing tally of time remaining -- 2 days 5 hours 26 minutes and 6 seconds…5 seconds…4 seconds…and on and on. Other creative variations included a skyscraper ad featuring the Expedition Bismarck movie trailer and an Eyeblaster ad that briefly took over the entire Web page.

“Discovery has a lot of rich content that can be incorporated into ads allowing users to interact with and develop an affinity with the show and brand,” says Mansdorf. The agency put that content to good use, creating a vivid, deep sea realm accessible through a pop-up window that could be launched from all the ad units. In the pop-up, a user-directed beam of light roamed through the murky world of the Bismarck, exposing buried multimedia content like James Cameron’s notes, a photo album and the show’s Macromedia Flash-enabled movie trailer.

itraffic measured interaction rates, click rates, impressions served, phone number entries and other interactivity with the ads and found that campaign results were better than others the agency has collected data on. The agency plans to work with Discovery in the future, particularly in the development of promotions for special television features.