Tailored Homepage Takeovers and Custom Ad Placements Bring Personal Touch to Entertainment, Sports and Business Sites
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Sprint (NYSE:S), purveyors of America’s most dependable 3G network*, launched a series of customized online ads showcasing the breadth of its Now Network™. These innovative spots feature interactive homepage takeovers tailored to the specific audiences of marquee sites, beginning with Yahoo! today and expanding to AOL, ESPN.com, WSJ.com, People.com, CNET, and YouTube throughout the following week. The campaign also includes custom placements on MySpace, Pandora, Gawker, FoxNews.com and Reuters.com, all of which feature ad banners containing feeds of readership-tailored data from the Sprint Now Network site.
Through a string of online placements, Internet surfers will be encouraged to engage with advertisements that entertain, educate and connect people to what is going on in the world now. For example, YouTube’s homepage takeover will feature a user-generated clock where users can film themselves for three seconds while holding up a pre-assigned number, serving as a digit on the Now Clock. Other notable widgets include a Twitter word search that lets you create your own flock of Twitter birds, Now e-cards that self-destruct after one second, and tiny construction workers chirping on their Nextel Direct Connect phones with a counter showing how many people are using those phones right now.
“These online media partnerships reach audiences with relevant and entertaining information while providing an interactive experience that is unattainable with traditional advertising,” said Mike Goff, vice president of national advertising, Sprint. “In today’s world, you can get virtually anything you want in real time, which is what life on the Sprint Now Network is all about.”
The campaign creative is focused on three themes:
* Entertainment: Music and social networking sites along with search portals will feature data about spray tans, movie tickets, and even the amount of plastic surgeries happening right now, as well as the number of videos uploaded on the Now Network.
* Business: Financial and business news sites will include a Wall Street ticker that displays whether the past minute has been bullish or bearish, facts about the amount of money being spent online, and how many people are checking stocks using their Sprint phones. There is also a visual representation of the cost of living that compares cities – for example, New York to Topeka, Kan.
* Sports: For sports sites, featured data will update visitors on the weather or the cost of a hot dog and a soda at Bristol Motor Speedway, Daytona International Speedway, Heinz Field and Lucas Oil Stadium, and facts about the number of people checking stats on NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile.
Additional campaign elements include added features and functionality to the interactive Sprint Now Network site and an expansive out-of-home initiative rolling out this summer.
The Sprint Now Network is more than just a physical network; it features America’s most dependable 3G network,* the largest push-to-talk community, and the only national carrier to offer wireless 4G services and award-winning phones and devices, including the most-anticipated wireless product of the year – the Palm Pre. Additionally, last April, Sprint revolutionized data plans with an all-inclusive price plan, Simply Everything®, which eliminated the fear of overages. Also, Sprint’s Ready Now in-store customer service shows people one on one how to get the most out of their wireless experience.
ABOUT SPRINT NEXTEL
Sprint Nextel offers a comprehensive range of wireless and wireline communications services bringing the freedom of mobility to consumers, businesses and government users. Sprint Nextel is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including two wireless networks serving more than 49 million customers at the end of the fourth quarter 2008; industry-leading mobile data services; instant national and international push-to-talk capabilities; and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. For more information, visit www.sprint.com.
* “Dependable” is based on independent, third-party drive tests for 3G data connection success, session reliability and signal strength for the top 50 most populous U.S. markets from Jan. 2008 to Feb. 2009. Not all services are available on 3G, and coverage may default to a separate network when 3G is unavailable.
