Tickets=Experiences in Toyota African-American Effort
Toyota hopes its online campaign's the ticket for connecting with young African-American consumers.
In a new promotional campaign for the Toyota Corolla S recently launched online, ticket stubs represent experiences — experiences to which the vehicle can transport the target audience of 18- to 34-year-old African Americans.
“It’s the vehicle to do the things you want in your life, this is the car that gets you there,” explained Derek Bonney, SVP at Toyota’s interactive agency ImagineThat. “[Ticket stubs] became the creative element behind the campaigns. Not so much because of what the stub was for, but what the stub represented, which is access to new and different experiences.”
The campaign’s hub is a Web site at getyourstubs.com. It’s designed to look like a corkboard upon which someone has pinned up various items: ticket stubs, photographs of young African Americans having fun, and pictures of the 2006 Corolla S.
Over the five-week period of the campaign, visitors to the site will be able to access new promotional material every week — information, MP3 downloads and ringtones — provided by partner Sony. Users who visit the site must enter their email address and birth date, and may check a box giving Toyota permission to market to them. Bonney said the agency chose those particular giveaways because its research said these online activities were popular with African Americans.
Users who want to be reminded when new material is available on the site can download wallpaper that mimics the corkboard look and feel. “Each week the elements change and update to what that new week’s promotion is,” said Bonney. In the first two weeks of the campaign, Bonney says 70 percent of people who have gone to the wallpaper page ended up downloading the application.
The agency has employed a similar concept with the accompanying advertising creative. The media buy stays the same, but the creative automatically updates each week to reflect whether MP3 downloads or ringtones are available on getyourstubs.com. Creative uses the “stubs” theme, with rich media units employing a sound effect of a ticket being ripped.
Ads will appear in 140 different placements, including on Vibe.com, BET.com, BlackPlanet.com, EURweb.com and on sites in partner Sony’s network.
“The campaign is definitely delivering where we expected it would deliver. It’s going better than expected,” said Bonney, though he couldn’t provide specifics.
Bonney said the agency was aggressively tracking every aspect of the campaign, from watching which ad units perform best in driving registrations to observing how users interact with the wallpaper reminder service. “We’re pretty full circle and fairly well covered,” he said. “Was it attractive? Did it reach our audience? Did we create the experience we were looking for?”
ImagineThat worked with Burrell, a unit of Publicis, on the campaign. Burrell created accompanying offline elements.
