Humdrum Idol
Website - www.humdrumidol.com
For Chicago Town Pizza, our sister ad agency BDH\TBWA have created the ‘Humdrum Idol’ campaign for the brand’s TV sponsorship of American Idol. Based on the fictional town of ‘Humdrum’, the TV commercial idents feature talentless Humdrum characters auditioning for their chance of fame in front of a gob-smacked three-member judging panel.
To support this campaign, DIGERATI\ have created HumdrumIdol.com, an immersive site that uses the TV panel members as part of an interactive Flash video homepage and is integrated with all offline activity.
Users can see extended, unseen TV footage and rate the auditions (like on YouTube), but a key feature of the site is user-generated content. We’ve extended the Humdrum Idol theme and set-up and online talent contest where users can upload their own audition via a customised YouTube group, and the winner can snap up a celebrity lifestyle for two in Los Angeles plus the chance to win $1million cash.
To help drive traffic there’s also a customised MySpace page, seeding on forums and talent contest websites, and online media activity using video ads.
We’ve absolutely loved working on this project, particularly the video experimentation we did to work out how the interactive video would work. And it was great working directly with the BDH\TBWA creative team and producers of the idents, who all needed direction on filming the real panel members in a way that could be used for the video on the homepage.
Filed under: Our Work on March 12th, 2007
[…] Here is a website I’ve been working on in work for a while. Those of you who who watch American Idol will be aware of the Chicago Town Ad’s either side of the breaks. Well this website, www.humdrumidol.com, is part of that sponsorship. […]