Showing home-bodies the thrill of travel
To support its In the Middle of Anywhere advertising campaign, U.S. Cellular asked Travel Channel’s Andrew Zimmern to introduce five not-so-well-traveled Americans to the joys of travel. The trips would be filmed and then showcased in a series of webisodes aptly named Big Country. Sposto was asked to help bring the initiative to life online.
First order of business was branding the program for web, print and broadcast advertising. When you have the backing of a host as recognizable as Andrew Zimmern, you don’t hide that fact…we made his name part of the logo lockup, and we emblazoned his image on every piece of collateral that could handle it.
With branding established, we moved on to the responsive site. It had to support three phases of content evolution: a casting-call phase (sweepstakes to find our five home-bodies), a webisode launch phase and a UGC phase. To support that evolution, we took a modular approach to the site design, creating content wells that could be added, removed and rearranged as needed. We also developed an interactive map showcasing each travelers journey and incorporated EngageScience’s UGC component, a wonderfully simple solution for adding curated UGC content to a site.
Finally, to drive traffic beyond the UGC hashtag efforts, we created a traditional display ad campaign with the usual suspects: animated Flash ads, HTML5 interactive video units and mobile companions.