September 16, 2004
Oprah & Pontiac: Over the Top Product Placement and a 276-Car Giveaway
Winfrey spent about half of the show on the Pontiacs - including a taped visit to the factory where they were made - and the giveaway was featured all over the media. Mary Kubitskey, Pontiac's advertising manager, said the company was looking to reach women, who are Winfrey's primary audience.
The company approached Winfrey about doing a giveaway, but the event grew in scope - and Pontiac decided to gamble by spending a chunk of what would have been used on traditional advertising, Kubitskey said. "Quite frankly, we have a car no one has ever heard of. We knew we had to go really big, and she was the holy grail for us," Kubitskey said.
Winfrey's influence with consumers is well documented. When she launched a book club, its selections were virtually guaranteed a spot on bestseller lists. Her personal trainer, Bob Greene, has his own endorsement deals, and her protege, Dr. Phil McGraw, launched his own successful talk show. Winfrey's annual "My Favorite Things" episode - when she distributes bags of goodies to her audience - inspires such hysteria in the crowd that it spawned a spoof on "Saturday Night Live."
"We're calling this our wildest dream season, because this year on the Oprah show, no dream is too wild, no surprise too impossible to pull off," Winfrey said. Making sure the audience was kept in suspense, Winfrey opened the show by calling 11 audience members onto the stage. She gave each of them a car - a Pontiac G6. She then had gift boxes distributed to the rest of the audience and said one of the boxes contained keys to a twelfth car. But when the audience members opened the boxes, each had a set of keys.
"Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!" Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage. The audience members screamed, cried and hugged each other - then followed Winfrey out to the parking lot of her Harpo Studios to see their Pontiacs, all decorated with giant red bows.
One woman stepped up onto the frame of a driver's side door, put her head on the roof and hugged the vehicle. Winfrey said the audience members were chosen because their friends or family had written to the show about their need for a new car. One woman's young son said she drove a car that "looks like she got into a gunfight"; another couple had almost 400,000 miles on their two vehicles.
The real question is, did it work?
Web sites operated by Pontiac and Oprah have reaped the benefits of the giveaway with a "massive" increase in website traffic. Web searches for "Oprah" and/or "Pontiac" increased 1000%. Visits to both websites peaked on Tuesday, with the Oprah website seeing an increase of 864% (over 600,000 visitors) and the Pontiac website seeing an increase of 636% (over 140,000 visitors). Visits from the workplace jumped for both sites, with Oprah's site seeing 60% of its visits from people at work (it usually gets 50%) and Pontiac getting 70% (up from 50%).
According to comScore Networks, visits to Pontiac.com increased by 322 percent over the average of the previous four days with about 85,000 logging on to the site that day. Tuesday was even better when around 141,000 visitors browsed Pontiac.com that day, an increase of 636 percent. Visitors dropped in the following days but were still well above pre-stunt averages, at 76,000 on Wednesday, 74,000 on Thursday and 69,000 on Friday. The previous Friday, the site had drawn 33,000 visitors.
The Pontiac stunt illustrates the lengths innovative marketers will go to in order to break through the ad clutter, and nowhere is the competition to do more intense than among domestic automakers.
The estimated value of the 276 new Pontiac G6s given away on Monday’s "Oprah" is $7.7 million. GM retails the cars for $28,000 each and says the expense of the donation was the equivalent of 50 ads on primetime television. A 30-second ad on Oprah typically costs about $75,000.
The promotion was also the best free publicity "Oprah" could ask for, icing on the cake after posting the highest rating for a season premiere since 1996. The episode earned a 10.1 national rating and also helped boost traffic to Oprah.com as well. That Monday, Oprah.com attracted 346,000 visitors, 551 percent higher than the average of the previous four corresponding days. Tuesday was even better for the site, with 634,000 visitors logging on. Traffic then eased but remained well above pre-giveaway levels, dropping to 290,000 on Wednesday, 244,000 on Thursday and 201,000 on Friday. That was still 259 percent higher than the day before the Pontiac giveaway, when the site attracted 56,000 visitors.
- Arik
Posted by Arik Johnson at September 16, 2004 04:22 PM | TrackBack
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