Interactive Advertising

I don't subscribe to many magazines, but I really love Outside because it helps me pretend that I go outside more often than I really do.

This month's issue had two really cool interactive ads.  Yes, that's right, interactive ads, in a paper magazine.  You know the do-it-yourself culture has really seeped into mainstream society now!

The first was an ad for Cooper Mini (The Hammer and Coop campaign) that has an iron-on design that you can put on your T-shirt.  Now, I'm not sure how many folks are going to get the iron out (if they even have one), but I sort of imagined some snowboarding knuckle-dragger setting Mom's iron on high and melting this decal onto the butt of last year's thrashed skate shorts.

This fun ad (I have yet to use the iron-on, but don't put it past me) led me to the Hammer and Coop website, which has some campy episodes based on the Knight Rider TV show, with a talking cooper mini and a handlebar-mustachioed tuffguy who's a cross between Borat and the Naked Cowboy from Times Square.  There are some laugh-out-loud moments with a ninja, the evil Aryan corporate suit representing "the man", and Hammer in his tighty-whities.

Now, I'm not exactly sure how much traction this ad campaign would get as a web-only campaign.  I'm not sure how else they are driving traffic to their web presence besides the magazine ad.  One of their videos (not my favorite one though) has over 500,000 viewings on YouTube in its first 3 weeks.  Some of their other videos aren't getting any YouTube attention though, especially the video of their Second Life party created by SL developer MillionsofUs.  A great idea, but they need to drive more traffic to this stuff for it to really work.

That being said, since I've just spent about half an hour watching their videos and thinking they're pretty cool, we can't complain, can we?  And this is one of only a handful of times that a magazine ad has driven me to a website.  I wonder how the ROI for this compared to regular TV ads.

I give the iron-on patch in Outside Magazine an A+.

Comments

[David Matthew]

You suggest a fascinating question: To what extent does the context determine the message (cf Marshall McLuhan)? I saw the same iron-on ad in Rolling Stone and thought it interesting only in a deja vu sense. Content was the same; context made the message completely different. (Assume that observers' perspectives were congruent, for the sake of the arguement.)
Organizationally, the same idea could flourish or perish in different enterprises.