"Hysterical. One of the best integrated advertising/marketing campaigns I've seen. The actor is key, but the context and in-page concepts are brilliant." —juror Kelly Goto
"Patrick Warburton's execution of sharp copywriting maintains a hilarious tone while he convincingly tries to sell some Hondas. It thoughtfully converts the idea of a traditional brochure site into a captivating pitch." —juror David Wright
Overview: Conveying the real, substantive good reasons for buying a Honda, with transparency and candor not seen in most retail-level car advertising, this site provides visitors with an easier and more entertaining way of learning about the vehicles. Targeted at people who are already researching their next car, the site is the nexus of a 360-degree campaign, with each element leading to the site. Instead of a boring traverse through car-review sites visitors are greeted with rich interaction and, based on their actions, guided to different sites with content that illustrates and supports the spokesman's narrative.
• Twenty people completed the project in seven weeks.
• The spokesman guides visitors through 100 different websites via 6 main video chapters; there are also 3 unique intro videos, 10 wait-state videos and multiple video assets for different user behaviors (such as exiting a chapter early).
• The site launched in September 2011 and received over 450,000 visits in the first 8 weeks.
Comments by Perrin Anderson and Bradley Stone:
Is the audience you were targeting a particularly difficult one to reach? "Car shoppers are bombarded with loud, often misleading messages; about 86 percent of them are already out there slogging through online car research. We took what they were already doing and made it more entertaining. We also went against the grain with something very clean, restrained and honest."
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "We wanted to achieve as much transparency as possible and have our spokesman appear over and comment on real third-party sites as they appear on the web. Not only did we have to balance this transparency with enough control to protect our client but we had to work out usage agreements with all the different websites to let our digital spokesman appear over their content. We also had to keep rewriting each narrative based on which sites agreed or denied permission; it had to be set in stone before production since the spokesman's actions were choreographed to the sites he visits."
