Gap Dangles Vespa In Online Holiday Promotion

• by Tameka Kee , November 20, 2007

Gap has tapped Yahoo to launch its holiday campaign, called GapTIDINGS. The promotion centers on letting consumers create video greetings and e-mail them to family and friends.

At the Yahoo-hosted GapTIDINGS (http://gaptidings.yahoo.com) microsite, users are invited to upload their holiday greetings and automatically enter to win one of three limited-edition Vespa LX50 scooters.

Users will also find tips and tools for making great videos on the site, like Gap-remixed holiday tunes from artists like Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong that they can add to their creations. They can also view and rate other videos, including greetings uploaded by Gap ambassadors like "Saturday Night Live" comedic duo Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, as well as port their videos to various social networking sites (including MySpace and Facebook).

Although Gap unveiled holiday-branded creative in-store over the past week, the digital campaign doesn't officially launch until the Monday after Thanksgiving, also known as Cyber Monday.

As part of the multi-platform campaign, Gap has tricked out a mobile recording studio that will prowl the streets of New York in the coming weeks, letting users hop in and create their videos. On select days between Thursday and Dec. 12, the mobile studio will target holiday shoppers at spots like Rockefeller Center and the Union Square Holiday Market, beckoning them to create video greetings.

In terms of the logistics, technology and strategy behind bringing video creation tools to the public en masse, it's par for the course for the Web giant, says Conn Fishburn, Yahoo's director of social media strategy.

"We have a group that works to help make promotions like this a reality," Fishburn says. "A brand will have a fairly fleshed-out idea, or sometimes even just a set of marketing objectives, and we'll work with them to take the best advantage of all of Yahoo's on- and offline assets to help them reach their target audience."

Gap will be supplementing the microsite with "a number of bids on keywords for search, and display media running across the Yahoo network," Fishburn says.