Volkswagen Has Fun Giving Away Über-Hard-to-Get Kraftwerk Tickets - New York Times (blog)

fun - Google News Google News

Volkswagen Has Fun Giving Away Über-Hard-to-Get Kraftwerk Tickets - New York Times (blog) Mar 13th 2012, 21:18 Volkswagen of America has come up with a clever way to remind consumers of its German heritage — or should that be "klever"? The company is sponsoring a flash contest to give away tickets to a series of eight live performances next month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that will look back at the career of the German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. Volkswagen of America is sponsoring the retrospective as part of a multiyear partnership with MoMA that began last year. Tickets to the event sold out quickly, partly because only 450 were available for each of the eight concerts, from April 10 through April 17. Volkswagen of America is giving away 50 pairs of tickets for each night, making those 800 tickets a hefty portion of the total of 3,600. Rather than run some kind of conventional contest, "we wanted to do it in a nontraditional way," said Audrey Eden, executive vice president for experiential marketing at Deutsch L.A., the advertising agency for Volkswagen of America, which is known for the VW commercials with "Star Wars" themes that it produced for the last two Super Bowls. Inspired by Kraftwerk, whose combination of music with technology in the 1970s prefigured many aspects of contemporary culture, "we decided on a contest that would combine low-fi and high-tech," Ms. Eden said, "retro and futuristic." So those who wish to win the tickets are being asked to create animated GIFs – the short, looped images that are often used online to make humorous or satiric points. That meant, of course, that the contest could be called the Volkswagen GIFaway. (How do you say "groan" in German?) The GIFs may be submitted to a microsite, or special Web site, vwgifaway.com.  The microsite went live on Tuesday and will accept entries through Friday. By early Tuesday afternoon, there were about 1,500 entries, Ms. Eden said, and six pages of them were on display on the microsite in what is being called the Fan GIF Hub. "We'll be projecting GIFs of the winners in New York City," she added, at locations that are being determined, "during the week leading up to the concerts and the week of the concerts." Volkswagen of America is also giving away 500 pairs of tickets to attend a Kraftwerk exhibition at the new Performance Dome at the MoMA offshoot, MoMA P.S. 1, from April 10 through May 14. Those who enter the contest are eligible to win tickets for both Kraftwerk fetes. Deutsch L.A. is the Marina del Rey, Calif., office of the Deutsch ad agency, which is part of the Lowe & Partners Worldwide division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter by clicking here. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions