Saab won't give actual figures for the number of entrants who ultimately bought a Saab (although the winner and others did), but Adams says that the company was keenly interested in quantifying the success of its marketing effort. "We did a monthly comparison of the database of names produced by the Internet sweepstakes against the databases of other advertising campaigns, including direct mail, dealership strategies, television advertising, and so on," he says. "What we found out was that the Internet strategy was highly profitable given the investment, and sales exceeded our estimates. Most important, we reaffirmed that the test-drive is the critical part of the strategy."
Digitas, which designed and built the technology around the advertising campaign, was also eager to measure results. "Saab wanted a high-ROI campaign that would be measurable across several metrics," Kenny explains. "We measured demographic detail on the number of people who clicked through to enter the contest, then clicked through to the local dealership to set up a time and date for the test-drive, and then actually completed it." Designing the contest page so that visitors could click through and communicate with their local dealer proved a major advantage, and tapped an aspect of Web advertising that other media would be hard-pressed to replicate.
On a cost-per-test-drive basis the advertising campaign proved so successful that Saab and Digitas recently launched another Internet sweepstakes, this time with the banner ads built around jazz music and featured on the New York Times and Washington Post Web sites. Says Price, "We discovered that our target market likes a little jazz with their wine, so we're offering a weeklong trip to the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland." There are rumored to be some respectable wineries not too far west of there. An easy drive, in fact. — RB
Reader Comments» Post a comment