The Power of Quirky Thinking

IN THE AUTO INDUSTRY IT'S said that most people start looking for their next car from the moment they drive their current one off the lot. And research has shown that those who are shopping for a car are visiting more and more auto Web sites before they go to showrooms. So it makes sense that carmakers would be among the first to integrate online and offline promotions, and specifically to incorporate search.

In the rush to integrate search marketing into their broader ad efforts, auto companies have been some of the earliest and most fervent converts. Think of the “Google Pontiac” TV spots that send viewers to the Web to get more information — complete with a shot of the Google query box. For a more tactical approach, look at Ford's recent Super Bowl ad launching a campaign for its Escape Hybrid SUV using Kermit the Frog as a spokesamphibian. Ford bought the term “Kermit,” but so did General Motors — after seeing the interest stirred by Ford's ad — to push its own hybrid line.

Honda took a novel approach with promotion of its Element mini SUV earlier this year. While it's safe to say most online car campaigns take off from a TV commercial and carry that message through to the Web, Honda and digital agency RPA set out with the aim of mounting a successful online campaign that then migrated, selectively, to television. The reasoning behind the reverse method was to create a deeper level of emotional involvement with the car's values than a standard TV spot could.

“[Car] features are boring,” says Mike Margolin, RPA associate media director. “How do you talk about features in an emotional way, especially in a really crowded market?”

In Honda's case, the answer was by letting visitors to an Element microsite pilot the car around a digital island and interact with five different animals, each of which shared some feature with the Element: a crab, a platypus, a possum, a burro and a rabbit. Users could download five Internet commercial spots using the same creative and forward those spots to friends. Once engaged, they also could link to the car's “official” site to get detailed information.

Margolin says the campaign was not originally destined for TV but rather conceived as a set of rich media ads for online display marketing, with some use of stills in the print versions. While the commercials eventually did run on selected cable channels such as Comedy Central, the intent was to avoid building a Web site around a freestanding ad.

“We started with the idea that we would see what we wanted to say and then figure out the best channel for it,” Margolin says. “The site went live even before the commercials aired. And the final frame of the TV component directed viewers to the Web site, Elementandfriends.com.”

But search engine marketing (SEM) was in RPA's media mix at the campaign's outset. And while the search effort's keyword list included the expected model names and some standard auto terms, the message's offbeat nature gave RPA a chance to do some novel things to build the brand.

“The Element is a quirky vehicle, and we wanted to get people thinking about it in a quirky way,” Margolin says. “We didn't feel it was important to reach the current in-market consumer. So instead of targeting keywords like ‘Honda Element prices’ and “Element dealers' and other lead-generation phrases, we focused more on people who were looking to find some fun online and kill some time.”

Instead of those standard keywords, RPA placed search bids on terms that broadly matched words such as “funny,” “freaky” and “hairy”: “funny movie,” “fun commercial” and so on. It also bid on the names of the five animals in the spots. Because it sidestepped the usual in-market terms for auto SEM, the agency's cost-per-click prices were a fraction of those for straight-ahead campaigns. (How expensive could the keyword “possum” be, anyway?)

One of the trickiest parts of blending a branding effect with a tactic as hard-edged and measurable as search marketing is to bridge the different metrics used in each. RPA accomplished that in its presentation by roughly correlating the cost of a keyword with the amount of engagement visitors coming through that term had with the site. That permitted a kind of return on investment calculation for the eccentric campaign. If a keyword was cost-effective but the visitor only interacted with one animal on the Web site, that made it less valuable than a slightly more costly keyword from which someone went much deeper into the site, interacting with all five animals and playing the game three times.

If consumer engagement was Honda's goal, it should've been pleased with the results of RPA's campaign: The average visitor played the Element game for 15 minutes.

“That's 30 uninterrupted 30-second TV spots,” says Yahoo! Search Marketing senior director Ron Belanger. “Think how much that would cost on TV, and the difficulty in getting people to watch even one full 30-second ad. To me, that's a much more effective use of marketing dollars if you know your message is in front of the consumer for a much longer and more controlled period of time.”