Advertising Of, By, And For the People

摘要

Donovan unks, a 28-year-bid biotech re-searcher at Stanford Uni-versity, spent valuable minutes every day for three months to follow an Audi marketing cam-paign. The ads for the new A3 hatchback, appearing in magazines and on TV, bill-boards, and the Internet, wove a compli-cated serialized mystery of a stolen car. Some 500,000 people, according to Audi, tracked the story by following online clues. But Unks and his friend Laura Burstein didn't just play the game. They were drafted to be characters in the plot by ad agency McKinney & Silver in Durham, N.C., after they answered an encrypted ad that only solvers of binary code could read in The Hollywood Reporter. In their Audi roles, the two drove all night to a music festival, crashed a par-were blogged about by fans of the sto- ry, and Webcast worldwide on the final night of the drama at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 30. Unks, a BMW-owner, ignores most ads. "But for Audi to embrace this type of gaming changed my opinion of them," he says, adding that he long considered Audi just a weaker rival to BMW.