• by August 8, 2007

A large portion of the avid motorcycle community--some 450,000 strong--is in the Black Hills of South Dakota this week attending the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Thousands of other bikers and fans who couldn't make the rally in person are flocking online for unprecedented live video coverage--via Harley-Davidson banner ads and a downloadable Google Gadget.

This marks the first time a Google Gadget has included live video, while the display ads arguably represent the greatest use ever of live video in a banner ad--offering 10 hours of coverage each day.

The campaign, created and placed by Interpublic agency Carmichael Lynch, actually caused Google to expand its "unlimited bandwidth" on Monday, as users exceeded the search giant's original capacity by spending an average of 13-1/2 minutes watching the live video via the widgets.

By Tuesday, 3,000 of the Harley-Davidson Google Gadgets had been downloaded, said Chris Wexler, the agency's interactive associate media director.

The online live video coverage began on Sunday, and the gadget availability was only promoted through word-of-mouth and seeding of relevant blogs, Wexler noted, as the agency "leveraged the social nature of the brand."

Meanwhile, another 30,000 folks by Tuesday had watched the live video via the ad banners for the maximum two minutes allowed and then clicked through to a Harley-Davidson Sturgis microsite for additional coverage.

The 3x250 banners--placed on MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Univision, Military.com, motorcyclecruiser.com and numerous other sites--were averaging a 2.4% click rate, about 200% above average, Wexler said. And 18% of those who clicked watched for the entire two minutes. Last year, when Carmichael Lynch ran some non-live Sturgis video in the Harley-Davidson banners, the click rate was only 0.5%, Wexler added.

Yahoo, which created a specific motorcycle visitor target for Harley-Davidson advertising a year-and-a-half ago, was receiving an even greater 4.88% click rate as of Tuesday.

Wexler termed this week's activities as just the first stage for Harley-Davidson on the widget front. The Google Gadget "will continue to add content," and the brand's widget strategy will move beyond Google.

To pull the entire campaign together, Carmichael Lynch worked not only with Google, but with DoubleClick's Motif for the rich media banners and Akamai for the live video feed. The agency also hired a full eight-person production team, fresh off the Live Earth videocast, to work onsite in Sturgis.

Live video coverage of the Sturgis Rally in any medium is quite a rarity, Wexler noted--and with the event's remote location, his team had to decide whether to "drill down into the earth" to tap in to fiber or go the satellite route. They decided on the former approach, with no transmission hitches so far.

The live video campaign, which Wexler termed a "stunning success," ends on Friday after a week.