NY Media (Co-Winner)
NYMAG.com Partnership with HSBC's "Values Soapbox" Campaign
Generally, advertisers shy away from user-generated content, but in the partnership between NYMag.com and HSBC, the active community of online readers were put front and center of a truly innovative campaign. The  campaign itself was tailor-made for user contributions. The “Values Soapbox” program solicited users to voice their concerns and ideas about a full range of topics, from immigration to nuclear energy, environment to education. The aim was to understand the values of New Yorkers.
NYMag corralled these opinions into usable content and marketing material by hosting a closed online chat room with five of the NYMag community’s most well-known commentators. The conversation threads were used within ad units and reused to seed conversations in a minisite. The campaign effectively turned standard ad banners into engaging instant messaging posts that drove the users into forums where their own voices could be heard. Other ad units replicated the look and feel of blog posts. Finally, a custom video channel included the original HSBC Soapbox TV ads as well as videos of users created at an earlier Madison Avenue kickoff event.
NYMag employed not only the full palette of ad units and promotional devices for this campaign, it activated its community to be a part of the creative itself. By serving 1.2 million video ad impressions, 2 million display impressions and hundreds of thousands of impressions for a slate of novel ad units, the Values Soapbox generated both traffic and media attention. The groundbreaking approach demonstrated how marketers must be part of a social media community in order to engage it.
TechWeb (Co-Winner)
Internet Evolution/IBM Partnership
Sole sponsorship is a concept that is as old as radio and early TV, and yet few Web publishers have embraced the simple notion of giving an ad client full share of voice and full credit for underwriting valuable content. The Internet Evolution partnership between TechWeb and IBM is one of the clearest demonstrations of the power of the true sponsor. In this case the sponsor funds the ambitious online community of big thinkers in the tech and Internet fields—Internet Evolution. IBM’s success with the site is tied directly to the editorial success.
The site has become a major presence and a contributor in the intellectual life of the Internet. With 125,000 unique users and 400,000 monthly page views, this is a collaboration of marketing client and publishers that has gone far beyond the usual parameters of a custom publishing or microsite project. IE has gathered some of the leading thinkers of the Internet era, from co-designer of the Internet architecture, Vincent G. Cerf, to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Around this super-blog, TechWeb crafts on behalf of the sponsor a lively community of engaged users as well as original multimedia content that keeps the audience involved and informed.
IBM’s agency measures the effectiveness of the partnership on a daily basis across 14 different metrics, from banner impressions to white paper downloads, podcast and video downloads to lead quality. By having a vibrant content mix at its core, the site consistently outperforms for its sponsor, sometimes up to 300% over expectations. For a recent video tutorial, the IE goal was to garner 32,000 downloads but it delivered over 84,000. Internet Evolution is an example of a true win-win-win marketing partnership. It serves the publisher by fully funding a major, marquee editorial project. For the advertiser, it gives IBM full share of voice and deep integration of its marketing message with the content. And for the user, most of all, this partnership results in a novel and invaluable resource—a true, fully funded think tank for the Internet.
Honorable Mentions:
Alpha Media Group – Hometown Hotties: Advertisers like Activision, AXE and Harley-Davidson were invited to pair their products with the Hometown Hotties in custom photos, videos and unique promotions that integrated brands with the models themselves.
Condé Nast Digital – Mercedes-Benz "Live Well Dashboard": Condé Nast leveraged the engaging expandable banner ad platform to bring a “dashboard” of compelling lifestyle content into an ad unit that rewarded both advertiser and user.
Yahoo! Inc. – The Thread: Over 80 episodes of the sponsored Fashion & Beauty videos from Yahoo and P&G, called The Thread, continued this wildly successful series into its second year online. This is custom, sponsored content that serves users and crafts branded content worth viewing.
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