• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer, May 12, 2008

During last month's broadcast of American Idol's "Idol Gives Back," Alicia Keys promoted her upcoming documentary, "Alicia in Africa: A Journey to the Motherland" both on the show and off.

Keys, a spokeswoman for Keep A Child Alive, an organization that distributes medicine to children with HIV/AIDS in Africa, launched her 45-minute film online following "Idol Gives Back."

This promotion was similar to Radiohead's album release of "In Rainbows" online where fans determined how much, if anything, they paid to download the album.

While promoting the film, Keys provided a Web site, which went live only after the conclusion of "Idol Gives Back." Until then, the site housed merely a trailer of the film.

The documentary follows Keys' 2006 month-long trip to Africa where she met and listened to the stories of those infected or affected with HIV.

Night Agency worked with Keep A Child Alive to develop the concept of promoting the film's availability online through Fox's charitable concert. The agency also created the Web site that housed the film and a MySpace page that additionally promotes the film and the KCA message.

Visitors to the Web site can donate money to KCA and watch the full-length film divided into snippets. Thus far, 523,484 viewers have watched the video and donations are in the "many many thousands," although the exact number wasn't disclosed.

"We wanted to build excitement around the film, and use our media partners to get as much awareness as possible," said Evan Vogel, co-founder of Night Agency.

"We scrambled to get the site up and running on time, as did our partners MySpace & Spiral Frog, as this was an opportunity we could not miss [appearing on "Idol Gives Back."]. From that moment on, we have seen momentum continue to build, and we expect our video view numbers to reach over a million in the next few weeks. We continue to add new features weekly, and adjust the site to incrementally build on each week's success and give consumers a reason to keep on coming back," concluded Vogel.