• by Karl Greenberg , June 22, 2009

While the effort includes a full complement of TV and print ads, it also comprises a number of digital innovations like exclusive sponsorship of the forthcoming launch of the Twitter/Technorati partnership -- Twitterati -- rich-media mobile advertising, advertising integration on Yahoo, MSN, CNET, Edmunds.com, KBB.com and other bleeding-edge elements.

For example, while Infiniti's campaign for the G convertible cars includes TV advertising, a chunk of that media buy is on Hulu, and network Web sites. The creative elements center on a vision of the car as a vehicle that offers driver and passenger the wind, earth and sky, and a great sound system.

On Yahoo, for example, Infiniti's media buy uses the virtual sun image from the home page's weather icon: the sun "moves" across the page as the G convertible's hardtop roof retracts. Another app promotes the car's sound system via a program that lets consumers use "stars" in a virtual sky to create a music mix.

The ads will run this summer across multiple digital and mobile platforms.

"We have done a lot online, but what this really does is expand our efforts much more into mobile than we have in the past," says Ben Poore, vice president of Infiniti, who notes that the proliferation of devices like Apple's iPhone has opened up mobile and that the company has recently finished updating its Web capabilities for mobile devices.

Infiniti is linking ads with mobile content via companies like 1Cast Mobile. MoVoxx, which links marketing to SMS content, is carrying Infiniti advertising through daily updates. The company is also advertising via free video desktop and widget apps like Clearspring and Cooliris.

Poore says the G convertible buyers tend to skew slightly older. "They tend to be empty-nesters, though you have younger people as well in their early forties and late thirties."

Poore says that while traditional campaign elements will run through the summer, digital will run much longer. And, while he concedes that expectations have been ratcheted back to reflect the market, the car has gotten a lot of hand-raisers, partly because of a long pre-launch window that included exclusive sale of the car in the Bloomingdale's catalog.

"[The economy] is lowering the entire water level, but we are encouraged," he says. "We have had over 18,000 hand-raisers for the car, which is more than we had for the original G coupe, which launched when the industry was healthy. And part of that is because we built it up over time. We revealed it a year ago in August, offering the premiere edition through Bloomingdale's."