• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 3, 2007

Amid a rise in energy-conscious marketing, Toyota has re-launched its community Web site for hybrid owners with the help of Saatchi & Saatchi LA.

Tapping into the current trend in MySpace-like community sites, Saatchi & Saatchi enlisted Firstborn Interactive and Vital Stream to design the site so hybrid owners can create personal profile pages and share their experiences with like-minded people.

The hybrid community site is certainly not the first attempt by Toyota and Saatchi at engaging consumers online. To market the Yaris, its subcompact sedan, Toyota and Saatchi sought out younger consumers using text messaging and online micro-sites. The re-launched Toyota site allows users to view owners by a host of attributes, from age group to vehicle color. The site includes additional features such as an interactive distance map--which charts how much further Toyota hybrid vehicles travel than ordinary cars--and a gas savings calculator.

The site will serve as a hub for future Toyota ad campaigns, with TV ads incorporating user-generated content submitted by hybrid owners, said Ryan Thomas, an executive producer with Firstborn. "One of the things they're planning on doing with the user-generated content is to pick people to be in actual broadcasts," he said. "It works in both ways as an outlet for the community and as a resource for the agencies."

While Toyota is the world leader in sales of hybrid vehicles, the entire segment still only makes up about 1.6% of the overall auto market. This year, Toyota expects to sell more than 100,000 Prius vehicles in the U.S.--which, although healthy, doesn't amount to a particularly large online community compared to MySpace or YouTube.

Firstborn Interactive created a similar site late last year for JBL for its "Destination Anywhere" campaign, which encouraged visitors to submit videos featuring the JBL brand.

Shankar Gupta contributed to this report.