• by Ross Fadner , March 3, 2004

Marketers are beginning to use the Internet as a branding medium, and rich media appears to be the tool that is making Web sites attractive destinations for major brands. Entertainment properties and Hollywood studios are particularly interested in promoting their content on the Web. At the DoubleClick Insight 2004 conference in New York City Tuesday, media agency PHD and entertainment marketing firm Deep Focus discussed case studies of successful online campaigns they ran for clients DaimlerChrysler and Miramax, respectively.

DaimlerChrysler is the exclusive sponsor of the Web site for NBC's highly successful show "The Apprentice." Omnicom Media Group's PHD handles DaimlerChrysler's advertising. The promotional event the agency ran on the Web site for "The Apprentice" allowed viewers to vote on the car to be awarded to the show's last man or woman standing. Each of the Chrysler models showcased would bring users to the Chrysler site when more information was requested. PHD Detroit's David Coffey, VP-new media technologies, admitted that he had no idea how the promotion would fare with viewers, but was pleased to learn that 35,000 consumers opted in for more information during the first six weeks of the promotion. The promotion hasn't concluded, since there are six more weeks remaining until the show's run ends.

The objective of Deep Focus' "Kill Bill Vol. 1" campaign was to generate trailer views for the movie's Web site before and during its release. Deep Focus' efforts resulted in three million unique audience interactions and two million trailer views during the six-week campaign, as well as the award for Best Rich Media Campaign at the DoubleClick conference.

The campaign began in October with several movie "teasers," in which a rich media ad for "Kill Bill" would show a sword slashing across the screen to reveal a branding message for the film underneath. "Because we just wanted to 'tease,' we needed to be clear and concise with our messaging," said Ian Schafer, president and founder of Deep Focus. "Using iconic imagery from 'Kill Bill' (the Sword), as well as associating it with (director Quentin) Tarantino, we were able to help raise the level of awareness, as indicated by audience- tracking data."

Once the movie hit theaters, banners depicting each of the individual characters from the movie were also deployed. Deep Focus was able to measure the effectiveness of each character ad in generating traffic to the movie site. In turn, the best-performing ads ran more frequently.

Schafer notes that the objective of the campaign was to make the movie trailer a marketable asset online. "The challenge with a movie like 'Kill Bill,'" said Schafer, "is that audiences are required to take an offline action. We needed to get people into theaters. This was not about click- through rates or direct ROI-based [return on investment] advertising," he said.

Deep Focus' targets for the campaign were males 17 and older, fans of action films and cult films, including Tarantino's other movies, kung fu, and B movies. Schafer noted that the campaign was most effective in generating trailer views, which numbered two million. However, online ticket sales were negligible, as online movie ticket sales don't tend to amount to much even for sites like Moviefone and Fandango, he said. However, 5 percent of opening week impressions resulted in local showtime lookups.

Schafer noted that Deep Focus wasn't left with a big budget to work with because Miramax also had to buy lots of traditional advertising for the movie launch. Although he declined to specify figures, online media accounted for about 2 percent of the film's spending budget.