A riveting ad campaign
Web marketing – A Portland design firm tailors a contest to draw in “Project Runway” viewers in promoting Levi’s women’s jeans
- BRENT HUNSBERGER
The Oregonian Staff
When Levi Strauss & Co. wanted to convince women that denim can be fashionable, it took center stage on Bravo TV’s popular reality show “Project Runway.”
The company also asked the Portland office of Avenue A/Razorfish to develop a corresponding online marketing campaign.
The result: an online contest that lured 2,500 consumer-crafted designs of denim jackets and dresses. On Thursday evening, five weeks after the Jan. 23 Bravo show, Levi’s announced online the winner of its Project501 Design Challenge: a jacket called “cute in command.” A company official pledged to produce it in yet-to-be determined quantity.
The contest — and Avenue A/Razorfish’s employment growth in Portland — illustrates the rapid expansion of online marketing and the multiple options the medium offers for large brands to connect more extensively with consumers.
Web-based, interactive design has been around for about a decade but is becoming increasingly prominent as Internet use and advertising grow, experts say. The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers estimate that Internet advertising revenue grew 25 percent in 2007 to $21.1 billion. The exact share of interactive online marketing is unknown — but certainly growing.
Nike and Adidas America Inc., both based in the Portland area, allow consumers, for a premium price, to select color schemes for certain shoe models, for instance. Chicago-based Threadless.com encourages consumers to design their own T-shirts.
But Avenue A/Razorfish’s work for Levi’s links advertising in the TV show to advertising online and encourages viewers of both to create, discuss and rate a client’s product and alert others about the activity.
Most likely, Levi’s is “being perceived as a company that is listening to consumers and listening to its target audience and inviting them to participate in creating something that is new,” said Adam Boettiger, digital marketing director at Portland ad firm CMD, who runs his own consulting firm, i-advertising.com. “I don’t think you can put a value on that in dollars and cents.
“Customers love to have a voice.”
“A different breed”
The Portland office of Seattle-based Avenue A/Razorfish, one of the nation’s largest interactive marketing firms and owned by Microsoft, has developed online campaigns for Coors Light, Best Buy, Levi’s and Northwest Airlines, some to industrywide acclaim. It’s an expanding agency outpost — increasing its staff by about 15 percent during the past year — in a city known best for its creativity in TV, print and magazine ads, making recruiting Web-savvy talent more difficult for managers.
“Portland has always been a traditional ad and design community,” Jennifer Friese, vice president and managing director of the Portland office, said at one point last year. “It’s a different breed we’re looking for.”
In “Project Runway,” contestants tackle a new design challenge each week, with one facing elimination at the end of each show. In its fourth season, most episodes feature contests around a brand with plugs to drive viewers to the brand’s Web site.
Levi’s negotiated to be showcased on a “Project Runway” episode because it wanted to raise awareness among women — particularly those who set fashion trends among friends — of the San Francisco company’s more fitted lines of jeans.
“We are thought of primarily as sort of a masculine brand,” said Megan O’Connor, Levi’s senior manager of online marketing. “We felt like it was a great way to introduce Levi’s to a more fashion-forward crowd and really align ourselves with the fact that we can be a women’s brand.”
O’Connor declined to detail financial arrangements between Levi’s and Bravo or Levi’s fee to Avenue A/Razorfish.
The Jan. 23 episode, according to The Nielsen Co., drew 3.2 million viewers, including 410,000 women ages 18 to 24.
Levi’s was the first brand partner on the show to drive viewers to a separate online contest pivoting on an activity that would resonate with target consumers, said Sharon Greenwood, Avenue A/Razorfish’s creative director on the campaign.
Starting in October, a seven-person agency team — most already “Project Runway” fans — built a Web site modeled loosely after YouTube’s format. The site enabled viewers to upload their designs, rate them on a scale of one to five “rivets” and comment.
The winner was promised a $501 gift certificate — after Levi’s popular model of jeans. Levi’s retains the rights to the winning design.
Three days, 500 entries
Initially, Levi’s and Avenue A/Razorfish avoided setting specific traffic goals for the site and worried that the submissions might not meet Levi’s production quality criteria or capabilities.
“We weren’t quite sure what the quality level was going to be,” Greenwood said.
The answer quickly became clear. The site received 500 submissions in three days, O’Connor said. In all, it attracted more than 20,000 registrants — two-thirds women — and 2,500 designs, Greenwood said.
“It has exceeded the lack of expectations we had,” O’Connor said.
Some of the designs were sketched by hand, and others were photos of outfits hand-tailored and fitted on mannequins. Some entrants submitted hats and gloves, and even toys, which were disqualified under the rules.
Greenwood’s team also incorporated a feature allowing designers to embed their submissions on their own Web pages, blogs and social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
“That’s one thing we know about these women,” Greenwood said. “They like to talk a lot. They like blogs.”
Attached to embedded designs was a “badge” with a Levi’s logo and invitations for viewers to vote on the design at Levi’s “Project Runway” site. Half of those who submitted a design used this so-called viral component — dubbed so by marketers because it’s designed to multiply across the Internet cheaply and from friend to friend.
The feature put the badge before about 30,000 viewers, about half of whom clicked through to Levi’s “Project Runway” site, Greenwood said.
Levi’s bought ads promoting the contest on fashion and gossip sites such as Pink Is the New Blog and Stylehive.com, a social shopping site. It also placed branded napkins in bars in fashion districts.
In the weeks following the “Project Runway” episode, Levi’s nontraditional styles, normally not among its top sellers, took over the top 10 women’s styles on its retail site, O’Connor said.
“Ultimately we were hoping to sell women’s jeans,” she said of the campaign.
