Meridee Alter Picks Audi
The Brand: Audi
The Campaign: Art of the Heist
The Agency: McKinney-Silver
"Other than one of our campaigns, I'd choose Audi's Art of the Heist campaign. It was clever and creative, well integrated from a multi-media and PR perspective, and it garnered high audience involvement with the brand (people created microsites to play along)."
Campaign Insight
In an article by Neal Leavitt that we published in July, he explained that ad agency McKinney-Silver designed the three-month campaign to boost visibility for Audi's A3 premium compact car. The campaign began when a new 2006 A3 was "stolen" from an Audi dealership on Park Avenue in New York City last April. The "thieves" left behind a smashed window. Signs went up in place of the A3 at the New York International Auto Show asking for information about the "theft."
The ensuing campaign included virtually every known available medium -- print ads, billboards, TV commercials, radio spots, websites, live events, emails, videos, wild postings, blogs, IRC chats, direct mail, voice transcripts, puzzles, photos and scanned-in documents.
Leavitt described the most intriguing aspect of the campaign as an interactive fictional story sponsored by Audi that was told across multiple platforms. It included live participation by followers at various events nationwide. The story used a technique known as alternative reality gaming, in which a community of users becomes a part of the story, interacts with the characters, and helps each other solve the mystery.
The Art of the Heist unfolded in multiple chapters via various story sites and a microsite. The websites contained hundreds of documents that gave the characters a comprehensive back story for the audience to go through.
Results
Leavitt reported that according to statistics researched and compiled by McKinney-Silver, more than 200,000 people became involved with the search for the stolen A3 in a single day. An estimated 500,000 people were involved in the search on an ongoing basis. Within the first few days of the campaign launch, fans created seven fan sites, one of which was a "Top 10 Reasons to Play Art of the Heist."
Website traffic to www.audiusa.com also spiked dramatically. May 2004 figures were 843,212; a year later during the middle of the campaign, traffic increased 40 percent to 1,199,049. Weekly microsite traffic increased steadily throughout the campaign, and took a huge jump when full-scale advertising started on May 15. As an example, daily microsite traffic was averaging about 33,000 from May 8 through 14; the following week it exploded to 281,000.
The campaign was a consistent source of leads to Audi dealers nationwide -- more than 10,000 leads have been generated so far, including 3,827 test drives.
Read the entire article here.
Author Notes:
Meridee Alter is senior vice president, media director for Rubin Postaer and Associates (RPA), one of the largest independent advertising agencies. In that role she oversees all online media planning, buying and trafficking for the interactive division, and provides liaison between online and traditional media planning/buying. She joined RPA in January 1988 as media planner on American Honda and was an associate media director on the Honda account from July 1991 to July 1995 when she moved to the interactive division.
