Great Media: Chevy Volt Journey
File under: “smart media buys.” Kudos to Chevy for a simple yet ingenious campaign for Volt. “Chevy Volt Journey” takes straightforward frames and expandable banners and turns them on their head with a branded content journey across the Federated Media network. Forget microsites and configurators and give the people what they want: great content.
Two lessons: first, make your media dollars do something for your target audience, not just for you; second, look to inspiration from currently successful digital things when you design your own.
In the category of amazing media buys, here’s an offering from Chevy for the Volt. It’s called “Chevy Volt Journey” and it takes fairly simple (if old-school and frequently shitty) digital implementations – frames and expandable banners – and turns them on their head.
NB: I pitched this internally at a previous job and was vigorously shot down by the media department. That was a big bummer. “NB” ≠ not bitter. Anyway.
Click the banners and you get something you’re probably interested in. Amazing.
The nuts and bolts of it are as follows:
- Chevy has purchased media and development across the network of Federated Media (FM) sites
- For their dollars, they get to put FM content into a branded, expandable frame that doesn’t send you to a Chevy Volt microsite or configurator, but rather to something else you’re likely to be interested in
- If you expand the frame-banner-jobby, you get a set of sliders that allow you to customize the content that appears in the the frame, thus personalizing your “Journey”
- The sliders relate to key attributes of the Volt, and you can’t turn all of them on at the same time. Because that’s not the way content works:
- Environmental
- Tech
- Mobile
- Design
- Volt (of course)
- And because FM has so many awesome sites for the somewhat affluent, interested-in-design-and-digital-and-the-environment types, you’re highly likely to click into something excellent
They even did it with the rich media. Interestingly enough, you can’t click from these banners to a Chevy-owned domain. Because that doesn’t matter whatsoever.
Why? If people want a Volt, they know where to go to find information. They don’t need a banner to tell them where to go. But if StumbleUpon, Percolate and Google Currents are any indicator – and I think they are – people do need advice on places to find content they’re likely to enjoy.
Two lessons: first, make your media dollars do something for your target audience, not just for you; second, look to inspiration from currently successful digital things when you design your own.
Nice work, Chevy media people, wherever you are.
This post originally appeared on Clay Jones’ own blog.
