Tied in Category Buzz Pick-Up

AWARD CATEGORY New Media

CAMPAIGN MXT — YouTube Director

Agency Fathom Communications

Client Navistar International

International Trucks unveiled its answer to the Hummer H1 at last year’s Chicago Auto Show: the International MXT, a pick-up truck.

With only 300 of the vehicles to be produced for the year, ownership was touted as exclusive. But advance orders were slow.

The manufacturer had limited marketing resources, with the auto show being the main — well only — focus. Awareness quickly waned.

International Trucks subsequently engaged Fathom Communications to come up with a campaign that would transform the MXT into a high profile vehicle. But the budget was still relatively minimal: $12,000, forcing YouTube to become the driving force in meeting the dual objectives of increasing brand engagement and driving traffic to the MXT Web site.

“It necessitated taking a little bit different take on things,” says Jeff Summers, Fathom management supervisor. “This was an opportunity to leverage the mass appeal of YouTube to do that.”

Fathom encouraged submitters to create content that conveyed the MXT’s benefits in humorous vignettes without delivering specific marketing messages. Fathom selected two known YouTube “directors,” a designated category bordering on professional. The status allows, for example, submissions of long-form programs as opposed to merely amateur shorts.

In any case, the two resulting videos cost a combined $12,000 (i.e., the total budget), which was turned over to the directors to write, direct, edit and post.

“This was the first foray for Navistar (International Trucks’ parent company) into user-generated content. It was a challenge to get them to buy into this idea,” Summers recalls. “But it seemed the perfect way to get new eyeballs to check out this product.”

For the duration of the three-month campaign, videos were planted in the Featured Video spaces on YouTube and other social networking sites, including MySpace. The results surpassed Fathom’s expectations: the spots drew 195,343 total views, compared to a projected 50,000. “People weren’t turning off because it was a marketing message,” Summers says. “They were engaged, because it wasn’t over-the-top as a marketing message.”

Vanity URLs were set up for each of the videos to redirect Web surfers to the MXT site, where registrations of prospective buyers were collected. The video views sparked 1,323 visits to the MXT Web site and ultimately generated 35 sales leads.

And the campaign made YouTube believers of Navistar and Fathom. “It was good to see that we could deliver results, so we can consider campaigns like this in the future,” says Summers.
— Richard Tedesco

IDEA TO STEAL
YOUTUBE WORKS

Be inventive with limited marketing budgets. Consider YouTube and similar user-generated sites to plant brand seeds with subtle, inexpensive marketing messages. The cost in this case was concentrated in the creative content rather than a potentially pricey media buy that might have minimized the campaign’s reach.