Civic Nation Microsite: Mix your own Anthem

Honda tunes into Civic Nation via anthem mix-off

Honda is rallying its peeps around a major Civic Nation mix-off in an effort to re-energize its Civic brand with younger demos. Leveraging the "United We Drive" campaign, which was first launched by Honda four years ago, the latest national program has a new spin - literally - by inviting Civic fans to create an "Anthem for the Nation" on a newly created sound track mixer from samples developed by local hip hop celeb Saukrates.

With media buys helmed by the brand's long-time agency PHD, and creative helmed by Toronto-based Grip, the new campaign spans TV, online, radio and out-of-home elements all designed to drive its target 18- to 34-year-old demo to the microsite. There, a mixer complete with a timeline scrubber and sync pads invites users to create a 30-second track from a choice of categories - Electronica, Hip Hop or Electro Pop.

The mixer engages users by allowing them to pull in different loops of instruments - percussion, organ, bass and strings - before publishing them to the site to garner votes. The anthem with top votes from the Civic Nation mix-off wins the prize: airing for two weeks as the intro to DJ megastar Starting from Scratch's show on the Traffic Flow MixShow on Flow 93.5 - a radio station with a highly urban and multicultural demo.

"Scratch is probably the most famous DJ in Canada," Ravi Dindayal, director, interactive at Grip tells MiC. "He has a very diverse audience and Civic is a very multicultural brand. We thought that the show was big enough to create a strong enough incentive."

To help users gain more votes (and tip off the viral aspect of the contest), Grip has also created a piece of player code that acts like an ad to the track, available on the microsite, that users can cut and post to their blog, on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. Over 250 songs have been created over the past three weeks, and the site has received over 30,000 unique hits according to Google Analytics. "We tried to build as many social hooks as possible," notes Dindayal.

Source;

http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20091015/hondatuner.html