• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 21, 2006

Ad agencies frequently talk about using media as a canvass to paint a portrait of their clients' brands. On Saturday, Zenithmedia will start doing that literally for client Toyota's Scion brand. In what may be a first of its kind media effort for a major automotive brand, Zenithmedia will kick off a series of experiential media events that will set-up, break-down and set up again in major cities, much like the rave culture many of Scion's core consumer of men 18-24 can relate to. The first event, which will run for 30-days beginning Saturday, takes place in an abandoned supermarket at 580 Hayes Street, an artsy neighborhood in San Francisco, where cutting edge artists and popular deejays will render their own interpretations of the Scion brand to any passerby who cares to participate.

Dubbed the "Scion Dashboard," the event, which is being produced with support from multimedia marketing shop malbon Brothers Farms and creative boutique Attik, is intended to be an unobtrusive way for hip, young men to interact with the Scion brand.

"The guy we are chasing is very suspicious of traditional media executions and things like that. They don't want to be talked to . They want to find out these things for themselves," says an executive familiar with the effort, which will be officially announced by Toyota today.

That's very much in keeping with the Scion brand, a car line that was created to appeal to skeptical young men who eschew marketing pitches, but want to discover, immerse and customize their own brands around their individual lifestyles.

"We just want them to come in and say, 'Wow, this stuff is cool.' We want to be known as the cool brand," says the insider, adding that the effort will not be benchmarked against traditional media metrics, such as post-buys, audience impressions, or even a CPM.

"We really are not like a packaged goods company where we need to see the CPM on everything we do. A lot of it is feel or gut. If we have an idea we think the public will take to, we don't get too hung up on the CPM," said the executive, noting this is increasingly true of the automotive category, which is willing to take risks with new forms of media that cannot be calculated based on conventional media value.

Automotive brands, in fact, have been some of the leading innovators of interactive TV efforts, including video-on-demand, satellite TV, broadband channels and other platforms that other mainstream marketers are still just thinking about.

Scion's experiential strategy also appears to be like no other before. While trendy West Coast artists such as Big Foot, Shawn Barber, and Ricardo Richey, do their thing on canvasses inside and outside 580 Hayes Street, pedestrians will be invited in to create their own renditions of Scions via computer assisted design programs, that will be printed on to t-shirts and jackets, which will be given away as premiums.

At the end of the 30-day San Francisco run, the experience will shut down and set up in another city, in an abandoned storefront, an empty garage, or some other underground venue in a fashionably cool neighborhood.