How Web Sites Can Bring Their Brand Offline to the People
As the Web goes mainstream, so must promotional and branding tactics. From co-hosting local activities to staging media-grabbing live events, the grand showy tradition of events-based marketing has some important old trick to teach the new medium.
Brand-blaring, attention-getting, in-your-face promos were mainstays of filmdom PR decades before your wise-cracking Webmaster was a zygote. It is hardly surprising that New Line Cinema (http://www.newline.com) and the Los Angeles Times Calendar Live city site (http://www.calendarlive.com/) are leading the way, turning an entire town into a movie fantasy, hiring bikini-clad roller-babes and even running a hog roast. Go ahead and scoff, say their adventurous inventors. These schemes worked.
The Genius of VFW Hog-Roasts
For Web content especially, live events introduce a product to wider audiences and can infuse it with new spirit. For last year's film release, "Pleasantville," Gordon Paddison, director of interactive marketing, New Line Cinema, needed to broaden the film's initial art house demographic. He created an on/offline contest for a trip to an actual Pleasantville in Iowa, where townspeople agreed to play along, dressing in late-50s style, roasting a hog at the local VFW and even re-enacting film scenes.
By piggy-backing the contest offer on New Line's cross-platform ad blitz, Paddison drove thousands of people to his elaborate Web production supporting the film.
Ultimately, the spectacle netted 14 television news spots on the zany event, "hits that were worth about $2 million" in standard advertising, Paddison told last month's ad:tech conference.
Even offline extravaganzas can be done on the cheap, especially if you ride the coattails of another department or company's promotion plan. "Anything that goes out, I tag. It's always a battle for point size and placement on these things."
Always look for major players rolling out new product, then use their resources. For an extensive promotion of "Lost in Space," New Line made fast friends with Sun Microsystems, which underwrote expensive outdoor computer kiosks that promoted the film through its Java-based applets. Paddison says that many of his offline schemes cost him little if anything in cash. "At the end of the day, it is about leveraging everybody else's opportunities," he concludes.
Which is one of several good reasons why "It's very important to put a media valuation on this," he adds. Calculate beforehand the savings your events generate for other departments or the CPM value for potential sponsors/partners.
Driving the Web to the Eyeballs
WashingtonPost.com-on-wheels (WOW) is one ambitious project that needs those sponsors. Its modified stretch limo stocked with satellite Web connections brings the site to the eyeballs. It would have cost about $350,000 without the underwriting of several local businesses, including the dealership that donated the car.
At sports and community events, staffers show off the the most relevant Post content for the respective audience and help many newbies get their cyber-feet wet. "We have had great success using WOW as our community outreach vehicle," says Erin O'Shea Starzynski, communications director. Since its December unveiling, WOW has logged on over 15,000 users.
And of course, the oldest promotional gimmicks in the book, skin and freebies, continue to have - um - legs even in new media. To promote the Los Angeles Times' new city guide, Calendar Live, in May 1998, Stan Holt, general manager, hired a dozen well-toned, unemployed performers for four to six hours ($3,000 per event) to roller blade into the major entertainment hubs in the market - Venice Beach, Sunset Boulevard and Melrose Place.
To get the most bang for your buck, however, "hit people in the business district during lunchtime," Holt discovered. Give the lunch crowds a branded tchotchke, and they go back to log on.
Along with the Times's fall student promotion, Calendar Live hit the campuses, distributing free browser disks at registration. More important to offline events is backing up these promotions with specific event-related online content.
The student survival guide that met incoming students at the Web site, for instance, remains Holt's most successful feature, and emails suggest that the site has succeeded in penetrating a younger demographic than the usual newspaper audience.
Don't underestimate the value of off-site promotion for your own people, Holt stresses. Calendar Live staff man the promo booths, which lets them interact with the community and provide better information about the product than any temp might.
The Calendar Live roller bladers reappeared last summer on a float at L.A.'s well-covered Gay Pride Parade, which attracted even the city's mayor for a photo-op. Getting serious media attention in L.A. is a real chore, but Hollywood is, after all, the town of wild dreams. Perhaps this year the roller bladers should pass out tchotchkes in the nude, he contemplates aloud. "We have to keep raising that bar.or lowering it as the case may be."
(Stan Holt, 213/473-2531; Erin O'Shea Starzynski, 703/469-2646; Gordon Paddison, 310/967-6615)