I'm thinking about cars today.
One of my clients is producing a show on interactive advertising and marketing in LA, coming up in March 2006. There are two major industries in LA that we want to tap into with our marketing: Entertainment and Automotive. So I'm researching the online marketing initiatives of various automakers to see who is doing some really interesting work, that that the auto industry - and their agencies - out west would flock to see.
Here's what I've found:
- Volkswagen has recently launched a site for the Passat with 120 online-only movies.
- Chrysler has an entire site devoted to video games, including one featuring a mini-van and aimed at Soccer Moms.
- Honda's "Hate Something / Change Something" campain for Interactive TV in the UK takes on a life of its own among North American marketers and dreamers.
All 3 are showing interesting work, and all 3 probably have fascinating stories to tell. But how to choose among them? One way is to measure the blog buzz of various companies, using a tool like the Blogs Trend Tool by Icerocket (thanks to Steve Rubel for inadvertantly tipping me off to it in a post from today on Micro Persuasion). It allows you to measure the blog mentions of up to three simultaneous words or terms. I tracked "<car company>" + "interactive" + "marketing" for the three car makers and got this:
There's an accompanying table that counts the posts. Honda has the most here, but not by much. Chrysler has the strongest recent showing.
Now what? Two things:
1) Don't rely just on this. I'll triangulate this against other speaker-selection criteria and see if I can't narrow down any further.
2) keep an open mind. In this case, I actually think the work Subaru is doing to promote the new Impreza via an online game, word-of-mouth and powerful use of its house lists may be more impressive. I tracked 'Subaru' against these three and came up empty. But that may reveal a new opportunity - presenting a case study relevant to this audience, but which they haven't already heard.
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