Lexus is at the cutting-edge of interactive advertising. The Interactive Marketing Manager gives his views on the industry.

Not long ago, Lexus executed a multi-media branding campaign with Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” starring Tom Cruise. The campaign revolved around an interactive game on the Lexus.com Website that enabled viewers to experience the two (2) Lexus vehicles Cruise drove in the movie. The campaign also included 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. Robin Pisz is the company’s interactive marketing manager. She handles most everything interactive-related for Lexus.com. Pisz spoke recently to iMedia Connection recently to give his views on the direction of the interactive marketing industry and the future strategies of Lexus.com.

iMedia Connection: What has your company done recently that’s different and unique in the interactive space? And can the data be tracked and supported with credible research?

Pisz: Lexus recently was featured in the movie, “Minority Report”. We supported this project with an integrated interactive and direct campaign that gave the viewers a glimpse of the future in 2054. It was targeted to a younger audience and allowed the user to interact within the environment and paid off with a video of a Lexus ad featuring the futuristic Lexus “Off-System” vehicle. Our online campaign included banner advertising and rich media to drive traffic to the “Minority Report” Website. We also included the ability to ‘frame a friend’ to promote viral marketing, and maximized our investment by having other countries link to this site. In addition, we sent over 500,000 e-mails promoting the site on lexus.com to a targeted audience. (Read more about this campaign here.)

When new projects are being developed, the metrics of success are established up-front and monitored closely throughout the campaign. For example, we saw a 30% increase in traffic to lexus.com from May to June and 25% of the visitors clicked through to experience the micro-site.

iMedia Connection: What sort of cross-media campaigns have you run?

Pisz: Every campaign we do includes all forms of media. At Lexus, sometimes the interactive will lead a campaign because of the timing, but it’s still integrated. That’s why we employ and use Team One—to make sure all platforms are working together to support our communication efforts. For example, every time we have a new launch, National may not have its campaign ready so interactive has to go out there first with preview sites, and information on our home page. We’re generating hand-raisers (people who are interested in buying a Lexus), and we put those into our database, and we’ll communicate with them. We also proactively test and use different forms of new media that even further integrate campaigns as we did with TiVo and the launch of the ES 300.

iMedia Connection: Can your company point to evidence that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics (purchase intent, brand awareness, etc.)?

Pisz: Interactive is just one piece of our integrated marketing efforts, and sometimes there are areas where online is more effective than other mediums. It helps in the purchase-consideration process, especially when consumers are doing their research on-line. TV’s great for awareness, and we don’t try to match the reach we get from TV, but we see our online efforts as effective in increasing familiarity, opinion, and purchase intent. This is evidenced by the sheer volume of BYL (Build Your Lexus) e-mails sent to dealers, and the brochure and test-drive requests that we track through interactive media alone.

iMedia Connection: Since interactive is considered by some to be the most accountable advertising and marketing medium, what are you doing to effectively measure the overall effects of various initiatives online, such as advertising, promotions, CRM, etc.?

Pisz: Each Lexus initiative has separate measures of success, which we continually monitor for optimization and identify what works and what doesn’t work. A few years ago, for example, our efforts were more spread out in our online advertising, but now we focus our budget on search/auto categories, because we get more action rates there, and with ownership opportunities within content (lifestyle) sites.

iMedia Connection: How essential is it for the industry to measure apples-to-apples by using comprehensive online reach and frequency metrics, such as online GRPs?

Pisz: Having stable, accurate methods of measuring reach and frequency on the Internet itself are more essential than the cross-media analysis. But why do we try so hard to compare online to TV? Because the industry is nervous. We should be measuring effectiveness, because you can’t measure effectiveness in TV, can you?

iMedia Connection: What are the obstacles preventing your company from allocating more than 1% to 5% of your marketing/advertising budget online?

Pisz: My online budget has increased every year, because we can measure and show evidence of its effectiveness and efficiency. We need to pay attention to the total dollars allocated to online efforts vs. just analyzing its percentage compared to an overall budget. Three percent could be more than enough to accomplish your online objectives.