Jockey looks to the Web for maximum exposure

This helps sell underwear?

Jockey International, the venerable Wisconsin-based purveyor of undergarments, has gone interactive in its marketing and is inviting actual and potential customers to post videos of themselves dancing in their skivvies.

The 131-year-old company is counting on bloggers and social networking sites such as MySpace to spread the word about a dance-off contest at jockeyunderwars.com that carries a $5,000 prize. It's the viral part of an interactive advertising campaign developed by Minneapolis-based Periscope that demonstrates the almost instantaneous reach of the Web.

Since it was launched in mid-October with a link on the company's home page, traffic on the site has exceeded expectations.

"It's been more successful than we hoped," said Patty McIntosh, Internet marketing manager for privately held Jockey. "The tournament voting was through the roof."

She likened Jockey's relationship with a younger audience to the first steps in a courtship, and said that it would take a year or more before the company could tell if sales are up as a result of the tack. McIntosh wouldn't provide numbers concerning site traffic.

Jockey also has a traditional television ad running on cable channels titled "Out of line," which shows a young couple in their Jockey underwear running from an assembly line of people being stamped to look alike. "Dare to be you," the advertisement says.

"Jockey wanted to do more to reach out to the younger consumer," said Bob Ballard, Periscope's vice president and management supervisor. Ballard said a companion site that shows a 20-something man and woman in varying states of underwear distress "has been a huge traffic-builder."

Building traffic has become the new mantra of the advertising industry.

"Last century was about pushing products, mass marketing," said John Olson, founder of the Olson agency. "The future is about engagement, connectivity with other people. Traditional advertising fails to do that in a meaningful way. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube -- that's what people want."

On behalf of client Nike Bauer, which makes hockey equipment, Olson assigned a cultural anthropologist to study the mindset and habits of 15-year-old hockey players. The agency wanted its representative to see how the kids interact and evaluate their passion for the game.

The result was interactive sites for Nike Bauer customers, where they could design their own hockey sticks down to the curvature of the blade, see how equipment is made and learn how great players achieved fame.

"We've just scratched the surface," Olson said. "The reason the Internet is such a powerful tool is because it is an engagement tool."

Internet ad spending is growing rapidly, though it remains a fraction of the total devoted to traditional marketing.

According to A.C. Nielsen, spending on Internet advertising jumped 24 percent during the first nine months of 2007, to $742 million. In contrast, $9 billion was spent on television advertising in that period.

"The biggest thing you're seeing now is that a lot of marketers are shifting their advertising dollar from the traditional marketplace to the Internet," said Jim Bendt, president of Gabriel deGrood Bendt.

Some of the credit for the Internet boom in advertising goes to the Minneapolis firm Fallon, which in 2001 and 2002 developed a critically acclaimed advertising campaign for BMW that consisted of eight short films directed by some of Hollywood's best-known directors and featuring actors and performers such as Madonna, Clive Owen and James Brown.

The films were available only on the Internet. By the time BMW retired the films in 2005, 93 million viewers had seen them.

"It was genius. It went against conventional wisdom," said David Hopkins, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "It set the benchmark by which others are measured."

More recently, Fallon launched a traditional television campaign for Cadbury Schweppes and its Dairy Milk chocolate that featured a closeup of a gorilla while the Phil Collins song, "In the Air Tonight," played in the background. When the frenetic drum segment of the song starts, the camera pans back and reveals that the gorilla is playing the drums. The commercial became an international hit on YouTube, and the Financial Times reported this week that Cadbury's chocolate sales are up this year over last.

"The walls between traditional advertising and online and interactive advertising are blurring very quickly," said Jim Scott, managing partner of the Minneapolis firm Mono. "The nice thing about the Web is that it's very quantifiable."

Fallon's Rosemary Abendroth said that, to succeed on the Internet, advertising "has to be very high-quality and very entertaining."

In that respect, advertisers are benefitting from the easy relationship that a growing number of young people have with video and audio equipment, making it possible to envision a Web-based campaign that relies on widespread amateur video response.

Mono has done Web-based advertising for General Mills, cable TV's AMC channel and Turbo Oven, an upper-end cooking product that features well-known Chicago chef Charlie Trotter demonstrating how the fast-cooking oven can kick out specialties such as rack of lamb and chateaubriand in a fraction of the time normally required.

"If I can get someone on my site for six to eight minutes, isn't that better than a 30-second TV commercial?" Mono creative director Michael Hart asked.

But not every Internet/interactive effort turns golden. A recent attempt by Target Corp. to enlist college students to tout some of its wares with discounts, CDs and other prizes earned the company rampant disapproval from the blogosphere after it emerged that a vendor had urged Target's "Rounders" group not to let on that they were allied with the company when filing their positive posts on Facebook.

"There'll be some missteps along the way, because everyone is still trying to figure out how this [Internet/interactive advertising] works," Olson said. "But we've just scratched the surface."

David Phelps • 612-673-7269