• by Karl Greenberg , February 23, 2010

Kia Motors America, which recently launched its largest campaign to date to support the 2011 Kia Sorento crossover, is continuing the campaign with a new digital media buy spanning 15 publishing groups through a collaboration with online media site Zinio and its Publisher Advertising Network, ZPAN.

The Irvine, Calif.-based automaker is also the first advertiser on ZPAN, a cross-publisher ad network. Kia's buy will be across some 45 digital publications in business, men's lifestyle, news, sports and technology verticals. The ads are rolling out in March and April 2010 digital issues of magazines like Car and Driver, Esquire, PC Magazine Digital Edition, PC World, Popular Science, Ski Magazine, SmartMoney, VIVmag and Yoga Journal. Readers will see the ads either by being subscribers to Zinio.com or the online versions of the magazines or by using Zinio's iPhone application.

The program supports a print, outdoor and television campaign that kicked off during the Super Bowl, with ads via David & Goliath, Los Angeles, Kia's long-time ad house. The Zinio Web campaign features a single creative execution by L.A.-based Initiative that shows the Sorento on an outdoor roadside billboard. When viewers click on the billboard, they are served portions of the Kia TV spot for the vehicle.

Michael Sprague, VP marketing at Kia, said in a statement that the deal with Zinio gives the automaker greater reach and furthers the tagline for the vehicle -- "a departure from the expected" -- by "exposing the Kia brand to a wide variety of readers across iconic magazine brands."

Jeanniey Mullen, global CMO of nine-year-old Zinio, which handles some 50,000 digital magazines, books and e-stores globally, tells Marketing Daily that it developed the cross-publisher platform because advertisers wanted it.

"We started to get calls from advertisers who said to us, 'I'd love to buy ads in all of the titles that make the most sense for me because our research shows people who want our product read a wide range of publications. Is there a way we can buy ads across Zinio that reaches readers of more than one magazine or vertical?' The concept is not to take ads away from large publishers, but to extend advertisers' reach," she says.

Mullen says the Kia ad will run over a 60-day period -- in most cases in the first 50% of the digital version of the magazine. She says ZPAN has several other advertisers lined up starting with United Way, which has a campaign on deck with the Ad Council.