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Kiran Aditham is a Business Management grad from the University of Central Florida, Aditham earned his stripes as a freelance writer in music/arts publishing.

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Mitsubishi, Organic Take ’07 Spyder for a Spin on the Web

Written on
Apr 28, 2006 
Author
Kiran Aditham  |
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Mitsubishi, Organic Take ’07 Spyder for a Spin on the Web

It’s no secret that the automotive industry’s shifted into high gear with its interactive marketing strategies in the last few years. From Flash-heavy microsites to banners and viral messaging, marketers have pushed the pedal to the floor in creating brand awareness online.

For the upcoming launch of its Spyder ’07 convertible sports car, Mitsubishi is now also throwing its keys in the ring, combining many of the above elements as part of a multimedia national advertising campaign celebrating the new Spyder as well as “25 years in America.” While BBDO took on the print and television components, Organic handled the creative for the Spyder microsite, as well as the upcoming summer online ad blitz.

The site flaunting the Spyder, though, doesn’t conform to the normal layout that some other agencies use to peddle cars. Organic went the extra mile, so to speak, to take the aesthetically unpleasing car specs and assorted info, and give them an interactive, firsthand twist. “A lot of vehicle sites focus on deep information, and a lot of vehicle sites focus on lifestyle and experience,” Guthrie Dolin, Group Creative Director at Organic, tells ADOTAS. “Essentially, the overarching creative concept behind both this microsite and the online advertising creative that we’re developing now is to really highlight these key features that the Spyder has by balancing the experience versus the information in a really elegant way.”

“Elegant” is one appropriate label to stick on the site, but engaging might be even more so. Divided up into sections including “Gallery”, “Inside”, and “Outside”, the Spyder site offers various rich media experiences with a simple mouseover. “What we did specific to the microsite is create a really simple and easy-to-navigate site that again pulls in and engages people. There were really three key points there that we really wanted to drive home, and each point we wanted to demonstrate in different ways.”

The gallery section, for instance, features slivers of images that expand with a mouseover, and from clicking on these, the viewer is shown the full image—which varies from inside to outside shots. “With the gallery, we didn’t want it to be just a bunch of little thumbnails and then you click on it,” Dolin explains. “We wanted just exploring the gallery to be a fun and fluid experience, so we came up with this idea where we would show them this little mosaic of slivers.”

But perhaps the niftiest subsection is found once you nestle inside the automobile. Not only is there an option to click and drag to give you a rotating, 360 view of the Spyder’s interior, you can also toggle between “day” and “night” views thanks to the car’s “ice-blue LED illumination” (below). “You get this sex appeal and almost nightclub feel,” Dolin says, “…It’s really cool and we wanted to play that up.”

While the creative for the actual ad campaign is still being tinkered with in the Organic labs, the microsite—which also includes viral, send-to-a-friend options—was developed firsthand with the Spyder’s actual architects to give it that added authenticity.

“To hear those guys talk about the features, we knew right away what was going to translate online,” Dolin says. “We were brainstorming real-time after we left that meeting [where] we were first getting briefed on doing this campaign and the overarching program online. We definitely got a good dose of the Kool-Aid direct from the designers, and that really informed the features and even the way we were going to present those features online.”

The Kool-Aid sure must’ve tasted sweet judging by how this site turned out.

While the underlying intentions were to drive traffic to Mitsubishi’s OEM site, Organic created a solid, interactive environment in itself that effectively pushes the Spyder’s stellar features (heated seats, romantic blue lighting) and whets appetites for the upcoming ad campaign. “When it comes down to selling vehicles online like this, you have a very short amount of time to get information across,” Dolin says. “If you do it in a bullet-point format, people are not ready to read online. They want to do a little something and learn a little about it. So if you give them this kind of feature to engage them, they’re much more likely to say ‘hey, what’s this about? Oh great, it’s got these heated seats, this illumination.’ We wanted to create these little things that gave an engaging way to illustrate these top-line bullet points.”

Consider us sold…at least to the site, that is.

Take the Spyder out for a spin at http://www.mitsubishicars.com/07spyder/





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