Swedish liquor marketer Absolut Co., known for the creative print ads themed around its vodka bottle, is testing the Internet with a four-month online ad campaign on StarMedia.com targeting Latin America and the United States.
Costing under $100,000, the image-building effort seeks to raise the profile of Absolut Vodka among young Latin American consumers who are on the Internet through StarMedia, the region’s leading Spanish- and Portuguese-language online portal.
“This is the first time that we’re advertising on the Internet [and] it’s also a kind of test to see what we can do there,” said Ann Stokes, communications manager at Absolut, Stockholm.
The campaign kicked off this month with three animated figures comprising images of the famed Absolut bottle. These images move vertically and horizontally over five- to 10-second intervals across the music, travel, postcards and entertainment channels on StarMedia. There are plans for 10 such spots.
Intended to entertain and arouse curiosity, the animations create higher-level HTML layers that are programmed to appear randomly on the computer screens of Internet users. This way, users will rarely see the same animation twice on their screen per online session. Users cannot click on the animations.
Conceived by Absolut’s Puerto Rican ad agency, JMD, the effort’s technology and execution was courtesy of StarMedia.
“Through extensive user research we can target the particular users that Absolut is trying to reach,” said Adriana Kampfner, senior vice president of sales and strategy at StarMedia Network Inc., which claims many Internet users ages 18 to 34.
