Adweek has named the Jeep Uncharted campaign “Best Use of Web 2.0 in 2006”.  It’s a great honor for Organic, particularly since it’s a complicated integrated campaign that defies easy categorization.   

Starting in late 2005, we began planning an interactive campaign to coincide with The Jeep Compass Music Tour, a multi-city concert tour of new and emerging artists headlined by G. Love & Special Sauce. We built promotion pages on MySpace and Friendster that served as a hub for MP3 downloads, musician bios, and tour information.  The idea was to reach a new kind of Jeep buyer – young urbanites, particularly women – through the power of social networking.  Once the tour started, flyers drove the concert attendees back to the web for additional tour dates and concert videos.  The profiles ultimately linked back to Jeep.com.  To date, more than 12,000 people have become Jeep’s friends, and there were more than 224,000 music plays. On Facebook, 10,000 people joined, creating more than 67 discussion topics. And the MySpace site is among the top natural search results for Jeep Compass, and friends continue to comment in the forums six months after the tour ended.  As Sam Cannon quips, "It’s nice to have friends instead of entries in a database."

Looking back, this innovative automotive campaign grew out of some our entertainment work, where collaboration with social networks is a standard way to reach a teen and young adult audience.  In our work for X-Men 3, for example, we were the first to build new functionality into MySpace as part of an advertising campaign.  We knew from our research that for our target demographic, their Top 8 was a constantly shifting measure of their friend’s social worth.  In return for “friending” the X-Men, users were given a “superpower” that allowed them to have 16 Top Friends.  The X-Men now have nearly three million friends, and the promotion was such a success that MySpace removed the cap on the Top Friends feature.

It comes down to great clients like Daimler Chrysler and 20th Century Fox who are brave enough to trust their customers with their brand.  To me, that’s the essence of Web 2.0.

Misha Cornes