VW and Firemint Team Up to Offer GTI iPhone Branded Content
The advertising and marketing blogs have been buzzing over the past week at the news that Volkswagen in US is promoting the new VW GTI using only an iPhone app. Much of the discussion has centered around the fact that this relies solely on the App store, blog mentions and game sites for discovery of the branded content. But this quote from Slide to Play sums up the VW point of view:
“[Our customer has] got an iPhone, and he is rarely five or ten feet away from his iPhone at any given time,” said VW Vice President of Marketing, Tim Ellis. “So we felt that we could earn essentially 10 minutes of his time with our brand, where a 30 second TV ad is quite a limited exposure.”
It’s a really well articulated example of approaching that need to “earn” time with a brand. Providing a highly playable 3D game with fairly lavish production values in exchange for this kind of brand exposure seems fair.
And now, in the last day or so, the developers of Real Racing have pushed the VW content into the massive install base for the original game. This strikes me as one of the smartest digital media investment strategies I’ve seen. Rather than fund the complete creation of the game, they leverage something with an existing fan base and add great content with virtually no need for media spend at all. Such a savvy way to engage and connect with an audience.
Comments ( 1 Comment )
[...] Dave King at The Royals, here is a great example of that: Volkswagen for the new VW GTI have teamed up with the Real Racing game – an existing iPhone app [...]
THIS is how you do an app | Under the Rotunda added these pithy words on Nov 01 09 at 1:44 am