What Drives Edward? The Volvo XC60

It's highly unusual for a car company commercial to generate any buzz, but team up with this Fall's most buzz worthy film and people start watching and commenting about your ad. The latest movie that uses a car as star in a film is Twilight: New Moon. A Volvo XC60 is driven by the film's protagonist, Edward, and with fans eagerly waiting for the film's debut this Friday, the commercial is satisfying some of that need with over 240,000 views and 160 comments on YouTube. And the hysteria is reaching epic proportions with comments like this from fans, "SEXY CAR DROVE BY A SEXY˛ˇ MAN !!" Way to go Volvo, your SUV is "sexy!"

What's most intriguing about the Volvo promotion is that it extends beyond the normal email or online marketing campaign for a contest. In this case, the contest is further promoted in a TV spot which by most contest standards is quite unique. But with a popular film to tie it all together, it's providing some excellent awareness for Volvo's first entry-level luxury SUV.

The promotion online includes a sweepstakes and contest with the contest requiring visitors to solve six phases, each borrowing knowledge from fans of the Twilight series. The first to solve all six phases wins a brand-new Volvo XC60.

The contest is the most confusing thing about the promotion. I have been getting emails from Volvo promoting each phase of the contest, but every time I click to "play the latest phase" I end up at the homepage of the WhatDrivesEdward.com site instead of viewing the instructions for the latest phase. Some deep linking into the What Drives Edward site would've been very helpful.

Volvo, probably realizing most Twilight fans are in their twenties and early thirties, decided to additionally promote their entry-level car the Volvo C30. Both in email communications and on the What Drives Edward site, there are side-by-side images of the XC60 and C30 for visitors to click-on to get more information about the cars. This is a nice way to extend the product portfolio to a more relevant product for site visitors, since the SUV may not appeal best to the contest participants.

If you wish to try your Twilight knowledge, there are a few days left to get the six contest phases solved or you can just enter the sweepstakes for your chance to win a XC60.

Consonants HGTV and GMC Team Up for Some Nice Content Integration

Reaching your consumers through natural pathing is a goal of all advertisers. If there is one mantra I have come to use in online marketing that’s go to where your customers already are. There are many examples of advertisers, across industries, trying to build their own Facebook, their own Snapfish, or their own YouTube. There are also a lot of ideas out there right now trying to gain inclusion in people’s social networks. While all of this is important to evaluate when developing an online brand experience, one of the better ideas in online media has seemed to lost its cache and that is online content integration. I finally came across a good example from a recent email marketing newsletter sent to me by GMC.

GMC Trade Secrets on AOL Living brings together useful consumer content relevant to the passion points of its potential customers. The execution also brings in some HGTV celebrities: Eric Stromer, Kelly Edwards, and Curtis Stone. The AOL Living section provides some rich DIY content that was developed custom for this site and not just a repurpose of content. My favorite was “Fix Driveway Stains” a nice integration of automotive relevancy and homeowner tip that currently has over 800,000 views.

Some nice touches include the “Get Weekly Updates from the GMC Pros” email hand-raiser. GMC requests some information about vehicles people would be interested in, plus timeframe when they may be in-market, but it also lets the user Skip the form and just sign up for the Pros' email content. GMC is respectful that all of the visitors may not be interested in the vehicles so the Skip button is prominent.

The site also includes an Ask the Pros section under every video. Unfortunately, like a lot of content sites like this the replies to questions asked are non-existent. People left a lot of questions on the site but it seemed only about 1 in every 8 had a response; though, the response was typically from another user of the site, not the Pro.

Overall the site really meets the homeowner, do-it-yourselfer at a level that is worthy of their time. Even with all of the GMC ad banners on top and along the margins, the site features the Pro content without overly pushing GMC in an obnoxious way. Sure there is some quick pre-roll of the Pros driving a GMC vehicle before a video tip is given but at least it uses the Pro in the pre-roll and isn’t a 15 second GMC ad.