That’s what happened to Illuminata analyst and CNET blogger Gordon Haff earlier this week when Scion xB RS 6.0 added him as a Flickr contact. I thought it might be a marketing move, given that the Detroit auto show was under way, and indeed a little digging showed that to be the case.

“We are promoting the new Scion xB Release Series 6.0 vehicle online through a variety of social media avenues,” said Kat Kirsch of Formula PR, which was involved with the campaign. Because the car has a lot of visual features, trying to reach “tech/online aficionados” on Flickr was one element of the campaign.

Of course, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site wasn’t the only part of the process. “We uploaded the first photos of the new car on Flickr and linked those to our micro site. We also Twittered about the car and photos and reached out to some of the key online Scion influencers. From there it expanded to the Scion Facebook fan page and Scion message boards like ScionLife as people started to spread the news.”

Her firm isn’t the first to try to use the Internet’s social fabric and related viral marketing possibilities for promotion, but it does provide a glimpse into how it works. As the Internet grows ever more ubiquitous, companies get more alternatives to traditional media outlets for disseminating information and reaching customers.

Word of mouth and its online equivalent can be a powerful communication mechanism, because people listen to their friends in a way they don’t listen to traditional media.

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The youth in question will be high school students from eight schools from each of the three regions surrounding Toyota’s three regional offices (Kansas City, Cincinnati and Portland). The students will work with their marketing class to create case studies and marketing proposals. Marketing executives from Scion will judge submissions from the 24 schools and pick three finalists from each group.

In the finals, the students from the top three schools in each region will make presentations in-person. The presentations will be judged and fist, second, and third place finishers will be chosen. Top prize for the competition is $5000 for the school to purchase school supplies. The second and third place finishers receive $1250 and $750 respectively.

The competition sounds like a win-win. The students receive some real-world marketing experience as well as the opportunity to win resources for their school. The Marketing folks at Scion get some fresh ideas from the freshest generation of new car buyers.

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Scion, a laboratory for experimentation, used the United by Individuality campaign as an opportunity to approach casting talent differently. Scion asked owners to submit images of their xA, xB, tC or xD, whether stock, or mildly to wildly customized. Scion then chose hundreds of these vehicles from more than 20 states to participate in its United by Individuality campaign.

“As owners and creativity are core elements of Scion, we wanted to generate an advertising campaign that integrated those aspects in an innovative way,” said Jack Hollis, Scion vice president. “We think the United by Individuality campaign will engage our owners as well as show others what the brand is about. I can’t wait for owners to be surprised when they see their cars in their favorite magazines, on a billboard or at the movies.”

While over 300 Scions were busy being stars at the photo shoot in the Nevada desert, more than 600 select owners and their guests enjoyed activities that embodied the brand – art, music, racing and tuning. Scion owners also valued meeting each other as the group often converges online, but rarely has the opportunity to meet other owners from across the nation in person.

This unique casting call allows the brand to demonstrate the endless and authentic personalization possibilities. As Scion owners are always the heart of the brand, owner vehicles are the focus of the United by Individuality campaign. The promotion will feature numerous combinations of individual and group vehicle images.

Scion also partnered with Tokion magazine to create a personalized September cover for subscribers and Scion owners who participated in the United event. The custom cover art will feature a Scion vehicle with the subscriber or owner’s name printed on it. Inside, the magazine will have several creative executions including a poster shot of the vehicles used for the campaign.

“Word of mouth is so strong for us,” said Hollis. “Yes, our vehicles are polarizing, but we are confident our United by Individuality campaign will spark positive conversation among Scion enthusiasts. Each vehicle in the campaign is so unique, owners will know who a vehicle belongs to or reach out to the Scion community to find out. Our owners are definitely united by individuality and we will continue to support them as they tell us what the brand needs to be.”

Scion continues to use an unbundled approach for its marketing and advertising efforts, allowing it to work with the best specialized partners in the industry. Scion and its partners were able to create an advertising evolution with this campaign by blending Scion advertising, marketing, owners and product.

“We will maintain our course for adventurous and authentic marketing efforts,” voiced Hollis. “We’re Scion and that’s what we do to stand out and engage consumers.”

United by Individuality launched with cinema the week of July 21, and will follow with print, internet, and out of home placement. Spots on select cable programs will air by August 4. Interviews with select United event owners will also be featured in the winter/fall Scion magalog. Images of the event are also on www.Scion.com/ScionUnited.

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Generally, ads portray products as pristine treasures. Lighting and camera angles conspire to conjure a glossy, gotta-have-it glow that beams out from laptops, cell phones, blue jeans, and hamburgers. Thus it’s jarring to come across an ad like this one, in which the product is first obliterated and then put on display as a crumpled mess.

But Scion has lately seemed to harbor a bit of a self-destructive streak. Walking around my neighborhood a little while back, I happened on a large billboard for the Scion xB. It had a photo of the car and two big check boxes. One was labeled “Champ,” the other “Chump.” Both were empty.

The billboard struck me as a risky ploy, marketingwise. That “Chump” box was far too tempting. Some mischievous kid with a spray can could easily climb up there and X it in. Even nonvandalizing passers-by might feel welcome to place a mental check mark there. Why would Scion invite us to think poorly of its product—and even suggest specific, disparaging language for us to associate with it?

It turns out the Champ/Chump billboard is part of an ongoing Scion campaign called “Polarization.” Other outdoor and print ads offer further check-box choices. Among them: “Adore/Abhor,” “Eye Candy/Eyesore,” and “Hell yes!/Hell no!” This TV spot—with its two identical xBs on either side of the screen and the “he loves me, he loves me not” voice-over—continues to hammer home the stark-duality theme.

Kimberley Gardiner, national marketing communications manager at Scion, explains that the campaign springs from the xB’s polarizing design. The blunt and boxy wagon has a vaguely Brutalist, flirting-with-ugly aesthetic. Instead of cracking self-deprecating jokes (perhaps about function trumping form), Scion decided to get confrontational. “It’s not something you often see from a car company,” says Gardiner. “Usually, a car ad is about how everyone should love it and run out to the dealership to buy it.”

The approach is in large part dictated by Scion’s target audience: 18- to 24-year-old men. This demographic tends to favor brands with a bit of in-your-face attitude. To reach them, Scion has used niche marketing—street teams, music industry tie-ins, etc.—and is airing this ad late at night on guy-centric cable networks like Spike, G4, Fuse, and the Adult Swim programming bloc on the Cartoon Network.* (Time was also bought on BET and the Spanish-language SiTV. Gardiner says Scion “does well with younger African-American and Latino male buyers.”)

The ad itself borrows its mood and direction from horror films. Listen to the opening sounds: dripping water, creaking metal. The spookily flat, disinterested voice of a child is another horror staple, dating back to chillers like The Shining, The Omen, and The Bad Seed. With the wrecking ball’s mechanized, impassive destruction, set in a dank void lit by dim fluorescence, the ad seems particularly indebted to the more recent Saw series—a set of torture-gore films that appeals strongly (perhaps only) to young men.

Knowing your core market and how best to grab it by the lapels are of course important marketing skills. But it’s also possible to attune your brand to one demographic without pushing away all others. There’s a real danger in adopting an aggressive, intentionally polarizing tone, as Scion has: You can repel buyers who might otherwise have considered your product. When the ad shows us the xB after it’s been totaled by the wrecking ball (smashed glass, bent metal), it looks like there’s been a horrific car crash. This sort of raw, extreme imagery is unlikely to play well with older consumers, who’d rather not imagine exactly how their car would look in the wake of a violent collision.

Scion would argue that older drivers just aren’t who they’re after, and that the brand is better served by laser-focusing on a specific target. And pissing off the olds is an excellent method of sucking up to aggro youths. According to Ad Age, Scion was the most efficient car advertiser last year, in terms of ad dollars spent per vehicle sold, so they’ve clearly worked out a cost-effective means of reaching the groups they want to reach. Those young buyers—once roped in by an entry-level Scion—might well graduate to corporate cousins Toyota and Lexus somewhere down the line. But Scion, in its current form, is a very low-volume brand with a lot of room to grow. And the fact is, you never know who a goofy-looking car might end up appealing to.

Consider the Honda Element, another modestly priced, boxy wagon. Honda designed the car with young people in mind, labeling it a “dorm room on wheels,” but when the Element hit showrooms the average age of its buyers turned out to be 41. Likewise, the xB—with its generous cabin space, solid engineering, and low sticker price—might, in time, find a fan base among practical-minded car buyers of all ages. Unless Scion succeeds in stiff-arming everyone but the youngsters.

Grade: C. Setting aside the ad’s effectiveness as a sales tool, I didn’t find the execution of the spot all that artful. I wasn’t gripped by suspense, wondering whether or not the wrecking ball would hit a car. I didn’t find the cinematography or art direction especially compelling. It was low-grade horror—a neutered version of an R-rated frightfest. If Scion insists on aiming its pitch at young dudes (who are the only people watching the late-night programs these ads are aired against), they’d better make ads that will grab young dudes’ attention and hold them riveted to the screen. I just can’t see this spot achieving that.

Correction, July 28, 2008: This piece originally stated that Adult Swim is a programming bloc on Comedy Central. It appears on the Cartoon Network. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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By Linda Moss — Multichannel News, 3/31/2008 8:40:00 AM

Toyota’s Scion will serve as the exclusive second-season sponsor for Adult Swim’s Assy McGee, in a campaign that will feature a custom “mock commercial” integrated into the middle of each show episode all for the entire season.

Season two of Assy McGee premieres on Adult Swim on Sunday, April 6 at 12:30 a.m. ET.

Assy McGee, an animated series from executive producers Carl Adams of Clambake Animation and Matt Harrigan, tells the story of a hardboiled cop with a bad attitude and an itchy trigger finger. Assy is reckless, violent and has been known to break the law—or shoot someone—to keep the investigation going. But he also is a great cop, able to get his man one way or another. Working alongside Assy is his partner Det. Don Sanchez, while The Chief always seems to be on Assy’s case.

The first act of each episode opens to Assy discovering a crime and figuring things out “before it’s too late.”

Following the first half of each episode, Adult Swim will feature the Scion animated “mock commercial” starring Assy McGee. Running about 35 seconds in length, the ad is set at a car dealership where Assy offers viewers low, low prices for the Scion xB. Following this hilarious take on a standard car dealership advertisement, viewers will return to the scene of the crime to watch Assy resolve the drama and solve the crime, or in many cases, take matters into his own hands to reach a conclusion.

Adult Swim and Scion have partnered in the past on creative marketing promotions, notably in 2006 for the original series Frisky Dingo when the Scion tC sports coupe was drawn directly into an episode of the show. Zenith Media facilitated both unique custom opportunities between Scion and Adult Swim.

In addition to the custom on-air integration, Scion will also extend their presence within Assy McGee with tune-ins running each week on Adult Swim.

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NEW YORK Scion is getting into the crest business.As part of a campaign by independent StrawberryFrog, New York, the carmaker last week launched an online effort centered on scionspeaks.com.

Users can create crests on the site by combining pre-selected icons like Scion’s logo and a bat holding a video game controller. The resulting images can then be used in everything from their AIM icons to their Facebook pages.

“The idea was that these guys are the people that everyone else pays attention to with their blogs, car clubs and organizations,” said Kevin McKeon, ecd, StrawberryFrog. As part of the effort to reach out to them, enthusiasts were given a password to enter the site weeks before it launched to the public. “We’re letting Scion enthusiasts be our marketing plan,” he said.

The site also hosts interviews with Scion owners and behind-the-scenes footage of how the venue was developed. As part of that process, Tristan Eaton, a graffiti artist and designer known for the toys he makes for Kidrobot, was brought in to design the icons used on the site.

StrawberryFrog’s campaign is reminiscent of the recent Las Vegas Conventions and Visitors Authority effort from R&R Partners. In that one, users could create their own badge with pre-selected icons that made statements such as “Weekend MVP” and “Ratpacker.”

Scion uses a variety of agencies for project work such as Scionspeaks. The carmaker, which targets young drivers who want to customize their vehicles, also hosts dance events and screens short films on www.scion.com/broadband.

“It’s the right way to do social media, which is to join a conversation in progress as a brand and enrich that conversation. What a lot of people do is create a fake MySpace page and try to draw people to it,” said McKeon. “These days, people see right through that. It’s all about finding a community already out there.”

StrawberryFrog also works with another automaker, having won the Indian car account Mahindra earlier this year. Other clients include Morgan Stanley and Foster’s Beer

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The displays are part of Scion’s “Out of reach” push launched over the weekend for its limited tC Release Series 4.0. The Toyota brand is only selling 2,300 of the vehicles, but hopes to use their elusiveness to further position the nameplate as cutting-edge and drum up some word-of-mouth buzz.

“The more we can involve people in the marketing, the better,” said Simon Needham, Attik’s creative director. “It’s just more memorable.”

Attik created the month-long campaign with technology company InWindow Outdoor, which helped implement the interactive displays. The screens will be located in Chicago near Millennium Park and in New York next to Bryant Park.

San Francisco-based Attik has also launched a campaign site, www.scion.com/rstc, and an online display ad campaign.

To further link the online and offline elements, Scion street teams will give away what Needham describes as “hipster nightlife guides” listing indie music and events.

Scion has established a cult following through its association with hip culture and music. Its interactive strategy has tried followed a similar path by exploring up-and-coming venues like virtual worlds Gaia Online and There.com.

With the interactive billboards, Scion is further differentiating itself, Needham said, in trying to reach its target audience, which mainly consists of males in their early- to mid-20s.

“It’s less about trying to sell a car than communicating that Scion is doing things differently,” he said.

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Bill Burris, Toyota’s advertising manager, said other Toyota brands aren’t necessarily stealing Scion’s customers. “It’s a danger here but we have a handshake agreement not to fish in each other’s pond,” said Burris. “I have joke I like, and it’s the difference between a Corolla buyer and a Scion buyer is that the Corolla buyer has a better FICO [credit rating] score.”

Whether or not it was a joke, it is a definite slam against Scion owners and would have been better off left in private conversation.

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Never one to shy away from an experimental marketing technique, Scion has created shareable widgets to promote three of its makes. The Toyota division partnered with rich media firm Interpolls to create and distribute the widget to sites including Gamespot.

The widget allows viewers to click images of the Scion XD, XB and TC to view previously used video creative from Scion agency Attik, or engage with polls or trivia content. True to widget form, the ad can be reposted to users’ Web pages or social networking profiles.

Scion has a long tradition of using non-traditional media to promote its brand and reach younger consumers, having launched its own virtual world environment and established virtual presences on WhyVille, Second Life and There.com. Its online ad buys have tended to target urban niche sites like Blastro.com, BlockSavvy.com, Streetfire.net and HipHopDX.com. The company has also worked with Interpolls before to create interactive HTML-based non-shareable ads.

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