Infiniti approached The Globe and Mail to help it more effectively communicate the company's core brand values to its target audience: professional males with a household income of at least $75,000.

The Globe was a natural choice for Infiniti, since so many of our print and online readers fit this exclusive demographic. Affluent and influential, Globe readers are more likely than average Canadians to own luxury vehicles. For instance, Monday through Friday readers of our newspaper are twice as likely to have vehicles valued at over $50,000 in their households.

Click below to watch Bruce Baumann, Managing Director of OMD, talking about how the project developed and how the Globe and his team created and implemented such a compelling and innovative program.




MSG and Infiniti's agencies devised a branded content solution that associated excellence in diverse disciplines ranging from glass blowing to golf course design with excellence in automobile design as executed by Infiniti.

The central component of the campaign was an Infiniti-branded Globe microsite, Excellence by Design. This unique showcase profiled six renowned Canadian designers from a variety of fields using video, text and photo galleries.

Magazine ads, online ads and television vignettes were used to drive traffic to the microsite, where visitors inferred a connection between the exacting standards profiled designers spoke about and Infiniti's own products, reinforcing Infiniti's reputation for quality, luxury and elegance.



Running from May 2007 through December 2007, the program's central microsite was supported by a six-part ad series (one double-page brand ad followed by one custom content page per design discipline) that ran in The Globe's Report on Business magazine as well as television vignettes that aired on the Business News Network (part of the CTVglobemedia family of companies, which includes The Globe and Mail). The site was also promoted with web ads on globeandmail.com.



Visitors to the microsite could watch videos interviews with the designers, read text transcripts and view related photo galleries. Links to Infiniti.ca were prominently displayed on either side of the top navigation so that viewers could click through to Infiniti's site for more specific information about the brand and its name plates.

The microsite received a total of 5,651 page views, 3,662 of which were unique. What's more, over 28% of microsite visitors clicked on to the Infiniti.ca website between the program's launch and mid-September.

Meanwhile, the BNN vignettes delivered 3.6 million impressions to males 25 to 54 and 5.4 million impressions to males 35 to 64, while ads on globeandmail.com delivered more than 3 million impressions.