Jam Media, a Los Angeles production company, has expanded its presence in its new campaign for Vizio, taking on creative responsibilities that extend beyond broadcast to a microsite that will play a video documentary series starring LaDainian Tomlinson (LT), the San Diego Chargers running back, whose underdog story parallels Vizio’s. Jason Wulfsohn, Jam Media’s co-founder and executive producer, discusses the campaign and how Jam Media took on added responsibilities to develop an innovative branding campaign for the company that became the leading North American flat panel television brand in Q2, according to DisplaySearch.
iSPOT: Please provide background on Jam Media.
Wulfsohn: My background is primarily as a director for Satellite Films, Bruce Dowad and Associates and November Films. I was a cofounder of Jam Media which exists to service agencies and client direct advertisers. We provide communication strategy, research, creative and all production related services. For Vizio we’ve been active in broadcast, radio and interactive and for other clients we are also active in media buying.
iSPOT: You said Vizio has used non-traditional marketing methods in the past. What have they done and how does this campaign extend that?
Wulfsohn: Our history with them dates back 18 months to their start in TV. We produced broadcast campaigns for them as well as radio. This is our first foray into interactive. We produced the microsite that’s about to go live. Vizio is a non-traditional advertiser. They use retail channels to advertise very aggressively, with highly produced box art that visually sets them apart. They never spent near what other big legacy brands spend on marketing yet they’ve been able to leap frog ahead of them in the span of four years. Now they’re firmly ahead of the others, yet their media buy is substantially lower. They wanted to continue that approach and we saw an opportunity to expand their presence outside the realms of broadcast, print and radio. We’re creating a video microsite with a four part documentary video series that tells the story of Vizio as a brand and LT as an athlete, because there are interesting parallels between them. The videos support the story of how Vizio came out of nowhere and went to the number one position, just as LT came from a very small town in Texas and went on to become a college and NFL star who has set records. There were strong parallels between LT’s and Vizio’s stories.
iSPOT: Can you tell us how the four-part video series was made?
Wulfsohn: We had a limited amount of time for access to LT, so the decision was made to shoot the documentary at the same time we shot the broadcast spots. We shot for a total of five days in Marlin and Waco, Texas. All of the on-screen material that features LT was shot at that time except for some interview footage that was shot in San Diego when we did the broadcast spots. We were able to break away in San Diego to do the LT interview. The remainder of the content was shot in Texas. It involved getting access to the people who were featured in the broadcast commercial, his mother, his high school and college coaches, some of his teammates and his wife. We used 35mm cameras for the broadcast spots and Sony F950 Cine Alta HD cameras for the videos. The decision to use HD cameras is because Vizio makes HD TVs and we wanted to make sure the content looks best when it plays on a Vizio.
iSPOT: What sites will the videos run on?
Wulfsohn: Only on the microsite, which is vizio.com/lt, which is a teaser site now, but will be launched very shortly. We expect and hope the videos will be shared by users on social networking sites like YouTube so they will appear there, too.
iSPOT: How will the four videos in the series be released?
Wulfsohn: The plan is to release one every two weeks through the remainder of the season and into the playoffs. We assigned a theme to each webisode. The first one deals with his childhood and high school days, the next one college, the third his big record setting college game and the fourth his going pro. Each one is given a name and each is designed to relate an aspect of the Vizio story.
iSPOT: How is Vizio branded in the webisodes?
Wulfsohn: When you watch them on the site, they play on a Vizio TV and there’s content around them that makes the parallels very clear. It’s integrated carefully to the site.
iSPOT: How does the campaign take the advertising for Vizio to a new level?
Wulfsohn: I think the marketing department at Vizio felt they’d be interested in leveraging their relationship with LT in traditional ways and non-traditional ways. There was a feeling that both could be powerful tools in telling the Vizio story. We liked the idea of drawing parallels in the narrative in direct and indirect ways. Both would be powerful ways of communicating something about the Vizio brand. Vizio is such a new brand and we’ve been asked to develop brand awareness. The legacy brands have a certain amount of brand equity. We thought we could establish the Vizio brand by making connections with LT and explore non-traditional ways of doing that.
iSPOT: In this campaign, you acted as both an agency and a production company. How do you put on both hats?
Wulfsohn: Vizio is a very small company with less than 100 employees. They are looking for a similar company to support their marketing efforts. We feel a more traditional agency structure wouldn’t be as well suited to their needs as our own structure. We’re also a small flexible company that can expand or contract to meet marketing needs of our clients and we can bring in people to support the process wherever necessary and deliver the highest caliber work. Our growth is like Vizio’s, it’s happened quickly. We started with Vizio when they were a much smaller company and we were a smaller company, too. There’s been a lot of increased interest from advertisers in taking advantage of our structure, bringing in the best from the advertising community without the large infrastructure you find at a larger agency.
Copyright © 2007 DCA Business Media LLC. All rights reserved. All text, photos, graphics, artwork, and other material on the SHOOTonline.com site are copyrighted. All copying, reposting or reproduction, especially for commercial publicity use or resale in any manner, form, or medium, requires explicit, prior, permission from the publisher. If you have any questions regarding copyright or use of the materials on this site, are interested in article linking, reposting, pdf creation, or any form of article re-distribution contact permissions@shootonline.com, we will try to address your needs and concerns. SHOOTonline.com may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, terminate the accounts of users who infringe the intellectual property rights of others.
