Online All Stars, Marketing, Announced
- by September 15, 2005
Earlier this week, we presented Online All Stars in the creative space. Tomorrow we'll unveil the Online All Stars for media. All of our Online All Stars will be honored at a reception in New York on Sept. 28, the second day of our OMMA EAST Conference.
Father of Gaming
This summer, when Jeep launched a new brand, the Commander, the company went to the Web to promote the vehicle with a branded entertainment site. Jeff Bell, vice president, Chrysler and Jeep Chrysler Group--and a passionate evangelist for new media -- engineered that decision.
The Web campaign for the DaimlerChrysler brand, featuring a fictional family called The Mudds, is yet another example of the company's commitment to increasing its online media and marketing efforts, says Bell, who has been behind many successful digital marketing programs for the Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep brands. "We will continue to push monies toward interactive and experiential marketing for three reasons," Bell says. "First, it is measurable. Second, it is more engaging emotionally, and therefore effective. Third, the highest quality of creative and technical talent is working in this area."
Bell, who is responsible for the marketing, product program development, and communications efforts for the three brands, has masterminded their involvement with online and pc-based video games, e-commerce initiatives, wireless platforms, and movies. Bell led Jeep's involvement with HBO's "Band of Brothers" and "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider II."
It has been widely reported that the Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep brands commit 10 percent of their overall marketing spend to gaming-related tie-ins and programs, a figure Bell won't confirm for competitive reasons. However, what he does say is: "In an environment where we have been reducing our total marketing spend, online has grown. During the same time frame when network dollars have shifted to cable, print, and out-of-home, we have moved toward interactive." And that includes Web, gaming, wireless, interactive television, and video-on-demand.
Bell got his feet wet in online marketing as director of retail marketing and e-business at Ford Motor Co. "My first job was to clean up the mess from the various Internet acquisitions made at Ford," Bell recalls, referring to Carpoint.com, iVillage, and Bolt. "The real gem was forddirect.com, which we were able to establish technically, and also gain the support of the dealer network via ownership and usage. In many ways, the things I learned at Ford about how they structured the Web influenced my later decisions at Daimler-Chrysler."
In addition, Bell's interest in digital media and marketing expanded his horizons, moving the brands for which he is responsible into gaming, viral efforts, wireless, and other new media platforms. As traditional "push" media have been compromised, he says, the company has been "nearly obsessed with moving all possible time and money to those areas that can be measured, which give a return on investment and provide interactive experiences."
Inviting consumers to opt-in and register for games, newsletters, and promotions has helped the company attract qualified prospects. The new campaign for the Commander builds on successful elements of previous Jeep launches, including the "Trail Rated" program in 2003.
The Jeep Commander program includes a combination of unique advertising, merchandising, and gaming elements. The effort is supported by a dedicated microsite that links to Jeep.com and features rich media, video, games, and quizzes designed to teach consumers about the new vehicle.
A highlight of the campaign is the dedicated site WeAreThe Mudds.com, based on a fictional family of Jeep enthusiasts. The site, designed by Organic, even includes links to blogs by the family members and downloadable videos of Mudd family vacations. Each video reveals coordinates to a virtual "geo-cache" of items that consumers must locate via a tool that was designed with the Google Maps application programming interface. Each time users dig up a cache, they are entered into a sweepstakes to win, for example, a Jeep Commander. All the Web marketing is a prelude to the official launch of the vehicle on Oct. 1.
"Jeff was the father of gaming at DaimlerChrysler and the founder of the online strategy that we still build from today," says colleague Julie Roehm, director of marketing communications, Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge. "He has a tremendous network and is the catalyst for many of our partnerships with companies such as Paramount Studios, and the entire music industry."
Harnessing User-Created Content
Talk to Jon Raj and it quickly becomes clear that he loves to connect with people and use his skills to improve the world. Those traits are evident even in the way Raj began his advertising career 10 years ago.
Back then, Raj was director of marketing for Teach for America, which recruits college graduates to be teachers in low-income neighborhoods. The post left him frustrated because there were no mentors to guide him. So, partly to learn the ropes of marketing, he took an advertising job with Saatchi & Saatchi. Stints at other agencies, including Ketchum and Tonic360, followed, along with an abiding interest in interactive marketing.
He then moved to the client side, joining Visa in 2000. Visa promoted him from director of advertising to his current position--a new one for Visa--this May.
Raj "champions the validity of digital marketing both internally [within Visa] and externally," says John Durham, vice president of Carat Interactive, who works with Raj on local industry group Bay Area Interactive (BIG).
Raj's purview includes creating Web extensions of ad campaigns in other media--most recently the TV campaign for the National Football League called "Metaphors," which launched last month. The spots highlight five NFL linesmen, each of whom represents the different layers of security afforded by Visa cards.
Starting Oct. 10, the Internet version of the campaign will put those players in several vignettes not featured in the TV version. This approach "takes the engagement factor much farther than 30 seconds," Raj says.
Such efforts are turning heads not only with consumers, but also with corporate management. "Jon has provided critical thinking and leadership in developing our online advertising, spearheading the rapid adoption of this new media, and integrating it into our overall marketing efforts," says Susanne Lyons, CMO of Visa USA.
Raj's creativity is a plus for his partners, notes Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer at Yahoo!, who has worked with Raj on such projects as Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Football. "Jon demands great ideas, and he always pushes us to think big and think differently," she says.
Raj waxes enthusiastic about the part of his job that encompasses advertising on mobile and wireless devices, gaming platforms, digital video recorders, and video on demand. "TV is a fantastic medium, but advertising has evolved and many [new forms of media] are being consumed," says Raj. "If we're not there, we're going to miss the boat. And Visa is not willing to take that risk."
To that end, Visa recently began running a wireless campaign on its Signature card. On the DVR front, last month Visa sponsored an ESPN segment, accessible only to TiVo users, on the "most unexpected" NFL players to shine this football season.
In addition, Raj continues to focus his time and energy on nurturing future generations as education chair for BIG. He is creating a curriculum to teach high school students to think more critically using advertising tools, as well as anchoring a series of podcasts on the Bay Area's interactive industry executives. Such podcasts, he says, will fuel college students' interest in becoming a part of the advertising world. "I wanted to give them a sense of who the people in this industry are," Raj says.
Reaching young people was a major component of one of Raj's favorite campaigns for Visa, dubbed "Ideas Happen." The online effort, targeted at 18- to 29-year-olds, ran in 2003 and 2004. "We really wanted to be a part of this group, but we wanted them to tell us what was important to them--and then enable them to make a change." So Visa strategists, working with the company's online agency AKQA, developed a contest in which 12 winners (as judged by their peers and a celebrity panel) each received $25,000 to facilitate their "big ideas" for making the world a better place.
Contestants were invited to create the Web experience themselves on MSN in essay, video, or picture form. "It was a simple concept, yet a breakthrough," says Joanne Bradford, chief media revenue officer at MSN, who worked with Raj on the campaign. "This was user-created content years before the current explosion of blogs."
Raj saw the campaign not only as a successful branding program, but as a chance to promote such winners as a formerly paralyzed man who wanted to make a documentary about the program that helped him to walk again. Another deserving winner created a wedding-registry site, idofoundation.com, that presented charitable donations as gifts. For Raj, the fact that "Ideas Happen" used the Internet and advertising to connect and do good was golden. "I have great passion for interactive," Raj says. "It's constantly evolving, and it makes me feel like I can develop something that hasn't been done before."
Early Adopter
Back when the notion of a computer in every home was a Bill Gates pipe dream, John Vail was proselytizing about the Internet in the halls of Pepsi-Cola Co.
The gospel according to John was that the Internet would be a major marketing channel--even though relatively few people were online in the early 1990s. Thanks to the prescience and persistence of the man who would become director of digital marketing and media for Pepsi-Cola North America, the world's No. 2 soft drink company has become an online leader.
"Today it seems obvious to everyone that, of course, you have to be in the digital space or at least have a presence on the Internet. But if you rewind five, six, seven years ago, it wasn't so obvious then. There was a lot of trepidation and concern about how consumers would adopt it," says Frank Cooper, vice president of promotions, interactive, and entertainment at Pepsi. "John was one of the first to make that bold step forward. He was saying, 'We don't know how it's all going to turn out, but we do know the impact is going to be significant. We need to play today so we can be effective tomorrow.'"
Pepsi began to crystallize its interactive media concept in 1995, when Vail paid $75 to register the domain Pepsistuff.com. Pepsi.com and Pepsiworld.com launched on Feb. 29, 1996. That year also marked the company's first online endeavor, in which Pepsi asked users to download the prize catalog for Pepsistuff, then an offline promotion. The measure, which drew 400,000 downloads the first month, saved $10 million in printing costs.
"It triggered us to say, 'Wow, imagine if we ever had the opportunity to actually run a program online. Think of the power and the savings,'" Vail recalls.
Pepsi's latest online initiative is a partnership with Microsoft to give away more than 9,000 XBox 360 video game consoles--one every 10 minutes for nine consecutive weeks. Even before the promotion started on Aug. 28, more than 100,000 people had pre-registered on Pepsi's placeholder site. The effort marks the company's 10th online-based, under-the-cap code promotion since 2000 and the fourth this year, following one with Apple for free music downloads.
After two years on the WB, the brand's Pepsi Smash concert series moved to the Web with Yahoo! Music in June. Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo!'s chief sales officer, observes: "John was one of the first marketers to get onboard with online in a big way, taking Pepsi's successful PepsiStuff promotional program and putting it online via Yahoo! back in 2000."
Hillary Chura, Tobi Elkin, and Phyllis Fine contributed to this report.
