Team One Advertising’s client, Lexus, took advantage of its association with Minority Report for some branding. The agency’s Associate Communications Director takes us behind the scenes.

In Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, released June 21st, Tom Cruise travels around 2054 Washington D.C. in a MAGLEV “pod” that zooms directly up to his balcony, and makes his escape in a shiny red off-system auto. Both vehicles carry the Lexus emblem, and were designed by Lexus and futurists specifically for the motion picture.

Taking advantage of its association with the movie, Lexus ran a multi-media branding campaign, complete with an interactive game on the Lexus.com site that enables viewers to experience both vehicles. iMedia Connection talked with Arthur Chan, associate communications director at Team One Advertising who oversees all planning for Interactive and New Media for Lexus, about the campaign.

iMedia Connection: How did this opportunity come about for Lexus?

Chan: Dreamworks or Universal had approached Lexus with this about three years ago. Back then, the focus was on the development of the script as well as the design of the car and production. It wasn’t until a little over a year ago when advertising first got involved where we had a clear vision of Lexus’s role in the movie.

iMedia Connection: Describe the total campaign – what were all the elements?

Chan: We had broadcast spots, an outdoor campaign, rich media e-mails, interactive, PR, and local events in which Lexus owners were invited to a screening of the movie . With some of these screeners, the MagLev and the “Off-System” vehicle were on display. There were many more elements as well…many of which I can’t remember at the moment.

iMedia Connection: What did the online component consist of?

Chan: Interestingly enough, the initial media spend didn’t include interactive. There was a broadcast buy surrounded by an integrated campaign that didn’t include a interactive media buy. There was a website planned, but no ad units to drive traffic to it…in the end we scrambled a bit, but I think we came up with some exciting work.

To promote our association with the movie, we developed a Minority Report “game” that gave users the experience and feel of the movie online, which is currently being promoted on our home page (http://www.lexus.com/). The game follows the plot of the movie, but obviously uses the Lexus cars as the main theme.

When we did decide to have an interactive media component, it was not much of an incremental spend, however it was still a great opportunity to do some great brand play for Lexus. So we basically just used larger formats such as 336 boxes as well as skyscrapers and created some great flash work for them. Ran into some k-size limitations with some sites, in fact, the original version of some of our skyscraper ads were just amazingly beautiful, but the k-size was just a little too large so we had to dilute it a little bit and they didn’t come off as well as we initially thought. Still, the 336s look really nice. We put those into rotation in the search, auto and lifestyle sites already in our existing plan, and also added a buy on TechTV and Entertainment Weekly to support those. This site list works out well for us, in the sense that we were not heavy in entertainment content, seeing that we were promoting Lexus’s association with the movie, not the movie itself. The game and the ad units went up the week of June 11th.

iMedia Connection: Why was online not part of the mix initially

Chan: Broadcast made sense from a pure reach & brand standpoint. At a certain point, we kind of wanted to stick with that requirement and didn’t necessarily feel we needed to create a huge campaign. But once we really saw the legs this had, the client got excited and decided to explore all the avenues they could.

iMedia Connection: How much of the marketing budget has been allocated to online?

Chan: With this campaign, there’s no way to break out what percentage of spending it was … it wouldn’t be a good apples-to-apples comparison because the dollars for different pieces of the campaign came out of different budgets.

iMedia Connection: What type of results have you seen so far?

Chan: It has been great. We’ve seen a huge spike in traffic to the Lexus site. So far, within a partial view of the month, we have surpassed traffic for the last three months. We’re seeing a pretty significant bump in time spent on the site (most likely due to people playing the game). A significant so far, is that there’s a huge spike of new site visitors about a 20% increase to-date. There is still a lot of quantifying to be done, however, we can already see that the qualitative successes of this campaign have been awesome.