Scion's Web-Based Pre-Launch Scorns Tradition

Toyota's Scion division is running a pre-launch campaign for its forthcoming 2008 xB, but it doesn't include TV or print. In some ways, it is as much about a multi-layer Web site as it is about the vehicle itself.

That's not unusual for Scion, which tends to rely more on viral and guerrilla--as well as grassroots--efforts more than traditional media. The new Web site is a waggish virtual world offering up an assortment of "places"--six in all, two more coming--that consumers can choose to visit, through which the xB roams and in which they can view ironic videos featuring people and animals with cubic heads.

The Torrance, Calif., company this week reported sales of 17,960 vehicles through February this year, a 23% drop in sales, including a 29% drop in xB sales year-to-date through February.

Although Scion's agency--Attik, San Francisco--created the campaign, it did not shoot the 17 videos on the Web site. Rather, Attik says, the agency sent out a creative brief to more than 100 videographers, then culled the 17 from the 140 entries it received. The account has been with that shop from the get-go.

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The site also hosts a raft of multiplayer games, half designed by the agency and some by game maker Bunchball. The effort includes street teams distributing merchandise and hanging wild posters aimed at getting twenty-somethings to the site, which launched last week.

One of the viral films began running in cinemas this week as a 60-second teaser. "Surgery" shows a Frankenstein-like doctor entering a room in which three subjects are strapped to beds, their heads encased in boxes. He removes each box revealing people with cube heads, but the third subject is a failure: his head is normal.

Neither the videos or the posters mention or show the car at all. The wild postings, for example, show only a stick figure with a round head and a knife in his hand. Successive posters show him cutting off wedges of his head until it is cube shaped. The only text is www.want2Bsquare.com. Attik said it hired an additional 20 staffers to support the campaign.

Simon Needham, co-founder and creative director at Attik, said the agency deliberately made the Web experience, not the car, the main attraction. "We have no intention of trying to just show the car right now--all we're trying to do is give people some fun and entertainment and give them the opportunity--if they're interested--to go and see the car, while not making it the key issue," he said.

"It's not like we're trying to sell the car as much as we're trying to continue to establish credibility and to make our target audience aware in a subtle manner that there is a new car about to be launched. We're not hiding the car, we're just presenting it in a different way."

He added that a more traditional launch media effort will come later, including billboards, print and TV. "But this is without doubt the first time we have really centralized all the advertising to a Web site. This definitely is the first time we've focused the Web site as being the core of the campaign."

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