Toyota Touts Camry With Thrillist Media

ThrillistToyota is touting the 2012 Camry via a custom program developed with New York-based, male-focused digital publisher Thrillist Media Group. The digital-media reality show, "Tour de Thrillist," is a coast-to-coast road trip in which comedians Matt Zaller and Jordan Morris drive to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Austin, Philadelphia and New York, taking part in a series of wacky competitions in each city while touting the new features of the car.  

The 10 absurd (and therefore Web-friendly) challenges in five markets include things like playing laser tag in acrobatic planes and using heavy equipment to play "excavator basketball" in an adult playground in Las Vegas. In New York, the two are doing a pizza-making competition and vying against each other in aerial/aquatic madness with the Argentine performance art show Fuerza Bruta. In Philly, they are skateboarding against each other and competing in a cheese steak-eating competition.    

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There are also such penalties for the loser as a deep orange Vegas spray tan, having to wear a Ben Franklin costume to the eating contest, and sleeping outside on a houseboat (via the participation of C2C online vacation rental platform Airbnb.) 

A custom-wrapped 2012 Toyota Camry XLE is their vehicle, and some of the "Road Trip Challenges" focus on vehicle features: which of the two can use the blind spot and back-up monitors and who will earn the right to control the Camry’s available Entune in-car technology system.

The travails of the two comics and their experiences with the car are being chronicled through video, blogs, photos and the like on social sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. 

The campaign also has a consumer incentive for watching: a chance to win a “Tour de Thrillist Experience” for one person and a guest. That prize includes round-trip airfare to each of the Tour de Thrillist cities, hotel accommodations (courtesy of Airbnb) and access to all the same activities as the hosts.  

"They actually reached out to us, because they want to reach our audience," says Adam Chandler, president and chief revenue officer of Thrillist Media Group. "Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles [Toyota's U.S. AOR] was integral in developing the experience. It was a back-and-forth process; we vetted a lot of ideas."  

He tells Marketing Daily that Thrillist has about four million subscribers, about 67% of whom are 18- to-34-year-old men, and about a third of whom are women. "[Toyota was] looking for non-traditional media venues, and we had the ability to support this dynamically both regionally and nationally with email and event activation. What we find [about the younger male demographic] is that you have to talk to them in the content they read, the types of content they like, whether text, video or social. If you do that, you get more interest than you would have six years ago when Internet was a one-way medium."  

He expects the audience to end up having been a lot larger than four million, since the social program is designed to generate buzz. "Because of earned, paid and social media, our expectations are higher in terms of reach." 

Chandler says the experiences were designed to be out-of-the-box, and therefore in line with the kinds of content the audience likes to interact with online.

Humor has been a central aspect of advertising for the new Camry and Corolla. The automaker's ads for Camry that initially ran during the Super Bowl played on the idea of reinvention, with one spot featuring a couch reinvented as a row of beautiful women (or men), and a highway patrol officer's pat down reinvented as a shoulder massage.  

The campaign for the 2012 Camry, the seventh generation of Toyota's top-selling car, launched late last year with a big social media element called "The Camry Effect" that was intended to connect owners of current and past Camrys with each other.

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