Promo - February 2009 - (Page 17)

The Players score engineering breakthroughs, and a futuristic vision of transportation in 2088. An image of light bulbs—evoking Thomas Edison’s wearying trial-and-error process—is recurrent in the first film, while a burning ladder, a metaphor for pulling engineers out of their comfort zone, recurs through the second one. One specific model, the Honda Insight, is highlighted in the “ladder” doc with a link provided for prospective shoppers. Other models will be plugged in future Webisodes. Takeo Fukui, Honda president and CEO, expounds on the ladder metaphor and makes recurrent appearances A burning ladder is a metaphor in one of the Honda docs for challenging engineers to move beyond their safety zones to reach for innovative breakthroughs. through the films, along with Honda engineers shot in extreme close-ups. The films are also being posted on Honda’s YouTube channel and other video Web sites. Honda is using 30second spots on NBC.com, ABC.com, CBS.com and Hulu. com. Page takeovers, roadblocks and pre-roll video will also help point Web surfers to the docs through CNN, Yahoo, Wired, Gawker Network, Discovery Channel and Time through mid-February. The carmaker may also pay to “syndicate” the short films on some of those same sites, according Howell. “We’re just trying to seed the videos in as many places as we can,” she says. Web surfers will be able to share and rate the films and subscribe to the Web site. Ultimately, there will be eight or nine documentaries produced for the series in a long-term campaign to extend over the next three to five years, with a new film to be released every few months. Honda sees its target audience as 25- to 49-year-olds who are tech savvy, value authenticity and are particularly drawn to brands they admire. Whether consumers warm to getting that up close and personal with Honda executives and whether—fueled by brand affinity—they buy Hondas, are questions that will be answered as the campaign plays out over the next several years. l P TELL YOUR FRIENDS: E-MAIL GETS A SOCIAL BOOST Name Media runs a collection of enthusiast Web sites for everyone from pro photographers and tech heads to astrology buffs. Together the ad-supported sites get about 120 million page views a month from 11 million unique visitors. Now Name Media is hoping to turbocharge those traffic numbers by adding a feature to its e-mail newsletters that lets recipients link them to the personal update feeds on their social network pages. Friends in those networks can go to the page, view the e-mail, comment on it and, if they’re interested enough, grab it and post it on their own pages. The platform, Share-to-Social from e-mail service provider Silverpop, assigns a unique code to every shared message so mailers can know whether their mail is being shared more on Facebook or on MySpace. Mailers can also use tracking to see which recipients’ social-net postings have produced the most clicks, pinpointing the true influentials in their house lists. Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey says the provider went looking for a way to combine e-mail’s measurability and opt-in with the viral potential of social networks, which research suggests are eroding e-mail’s channel importance. The result was Share-to-Social, which lets e-mailers add an embeddable link to messages and track their progress through social nets. Share-to-Social messages are also more measurable than “forward to a friend” e-mail campaigns, Nussey says, since most users use the “forward” toolbar button to pass along e-mail, even if they’re offered a tracking button within the message. Name Media has only begun to add social sharing to its e-mail, but sees it as a way to extend its communities beyond its niche Web sites. “We want to plug our sites into the broader Internet,” says Name Media General Manager Robb Rosell. “We’re taking newsletters that we’re already putting effort into and using them to create interest in our sites among new audiences.”—Brian Quinton Promo / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / February 2009 17 http://www.NBC.com http://www.ABC.com http://www.CBS.com http://www.Hulu.com http://www.Hulu.com http://www.promomagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Promo - February 2009

Promo - February 2009 Contents Editor's Note A Bitter Pill Moving the Pictures Exclusively Yours Smart Mart Web Watching Tell Your Friends Commentary Second String Q&A: Shop Right Cover Story: Game On! Game On! Resource Center The Agency Center Testing... Testing... Index of Advertisers

Promo - February 2009

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