Best Buy Launches Online Branding Campaign

In Best Buy Co.'s second online branding campaign, a stick figure challenges Web surfers' movie knowledge by reenacting some memorable movie scenes from Psycho, The Seven Year Itch and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Created by Digitas and Avenue A, the campaign heralds fun imagery and integrated brick-and-mortar messaging, which aims to create top-of-mind awareness and drive traffic to both BestBuy.com and Best Buy retail stores. The main messaging is consistent with Best Buy's overall brand message of offering customers different ways to shop for products that make life more fun. Digitas developed the creative work as a continuation of a previous campaign, which launched the fun-loving stick figures. Best Buy's online media agency, Avenue A, is responsible for strategic placement of the ads on a variety of Web sites including NYTimes.com, Disney.com, Weather.com and About.com.

The first wave of the campaign, which introduced Best Buy's stick figure sharing moments of fun with technology, was a test to see if online media could increase brand awareness. Avenue A developed online brand surveys targeting those users who had seen the Best Buy ad. The survey results showed that the campaign was successful in improving brand awareness, ad recall, slogan linkage and generated double the industry average of click-through rates. In addition to building brand awareness, the campaign also generated meaningful incremental online purchases of featured products. The second wave will include testing new uses of rich media using Eyeblaster, as well as versions using traditional jump pages.

Best Buy hopes to improve upon the successes of the first wave and gather further data on the most effective ways of reaching customers online with branding messages.

Mary Miller, vp, enterprise consumer marketing for Best Buy said, "Our new branding campaign is designed to communicate that Best Buy is a fun place to shop and has the products customers need to make life more enjoyable."

The second wave of the "stick figure" campaign will launch May 29 through June 26.