just saw a great bit by sarah dopp about the trend of an established company’s new community site campaign that involves an outdoor advertising strategy to drive traffic–case in point: reebok’s goruneasy.com that i already wrote about glowingly HERE.

what i find particularly interesting about this approach that’s being adopted not just by reebok, but starbucks as well (letsmeetatstarbucks.com), among what’s sure to be a coming slew of others, are the kind of pre-web 2.0 strategies–and their benefits–that are getting incorporated in this technique.

from sarahdopp.com:

• Billboard-to-web community-oriented marketing is being adapted with high visibility.
  

• By sending people to a campaign-specific website, they can monitor their campaign’s site traffic ROI without any confusion.

we’ve been employing this tactic in concert promotion for ages. the simplest way to determine the effectiveness of any ad is to isolate an offer, for example, letting radio station X promote a particular kind of discount offer that no other outlet is pushing.

it’s incredibly interesting also to consider the significance of using outdoor media to promote a web 2.0 site of a consumer goods brand. this is the multi-platform kind of “meta-strategy” that i think is going to become the standard for a new kind of campaign. one that fuses the best of the old (it don’t get much older than billboards, yo) with the new, and in the process fuses engagement WITH awareness instead of relegating the two to their own separate ghettos.