With many of the much-hyped Nasdaq companies either in the fiscal cellar or on their way down, and the interactive backlash in full effect, agencies and their interactive cohorts alike are combining their new media efforts with more traditional campaigns under the banner of integration.

A prime example is the Volvo S60 campaign created by Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/Euro RSCG (MVBMS), its integrated unit Fuel North America and the agency's convergent media consultancy Cylo, all based in New York. A follow-up to the net-only launch of the S60, this campaign used TV and ITV spots, a Web site, and wireless communications (PDAs, WAP-ready cell phones) to promote a contest during the 2001 NCAA basketball tournament (of which Volvo happens to be a sponsor). Drawing traffic from these "touch points" throughout March Madness, consumers were offered a chance to win an S60; those who entered the contest were also eligible to win a trip to the Final Four play-offs.

Creating a dialog between potential customers and the Volvo brand was key to the campaign, as was keeping the process as simple and unobtrusive as possible. Cylo worked with the agency on both the strategic and creative sides of the integrated campaign, which Fuel's interactive creative director Arthur Ceria says grew out of Volvo's hefty broadcast and online media buy during the NCAA.

"This integrated campaign was all about not being intrusive but letting consumers discover they had the chance to enter this contest, and, if they want, give more information and win a chance to attend the Final Four," explains Ceria.

While the TV spots directed viewers to the www.Revolvolution.com Web site, college basketball fans were offered many routes to the contest. Both CBS.Sportsline.com and Goto.com were part of the online campaign; sports fans intent on checking their scores via either site on their Internet-equipped cellular phones were invited to enter the contest. Similarly, a packet video of an enhanced spot was made available to users of PDAs packing wireless modems. The ITV side of the campaign was hosted on Microsoft's WebTV and AOLTV, which Cylo identified as the most viable interactive TV platforms.

"Our main concern is the end user, whatever platforms we are using. We are always identifying the needs and the

specificities of the platform we are using and as such, we won't throw Flash or other high-bandwidth creative on a cell phone," says Ceria. "The

language and the graphics and so forth were very branded to Volvo, with a unified look and feel. We invited the users to tell us where they came from on the Web site, and all of the different ways they could have heard [about us], but we wanted to limit the number of clicks. We arranged the entire thing into a five-step sweepstakes, but it could be completed in two steps. We weren't pushing the users to go through a long experience, it was up to them to decide what information they wanted to give."

While MVBMS and Fuel partnered with Cylo more than five months ago, this campaign had tight timelines, with all aspects concepted and executed in roughly three weeks. When the idea came for Volvo to leverage the existing relationship with the NCAA tournament, Cylo president Kirt Gunn says his company recommended the campaign hit customers from every angle.

"We recommended we reach all consumer touch points: anywhere someone was accessing information about the tournament, they would have an experience with Volvo," says Gunn.

With Fuel and MVBMS creatively informing the look and feel of the campaign to ensure its consistency, Cylo handled cross-platform integration, especially with regards to the ITV side of the campaign.

"We believe right now that WebTV and AOLTV offer the most creatively rich environments; also, WebTV has significant deployment," says Gunn, estimating the Microsoft ITV platform's rollout at roughly 1.4 million households.

As for the winner of the contest -- a QuickTime spot developed by EyeballNYC was posted at www.Revolvolution.com after the final NCAA game announcing the lucky fan's name. Interactive elements will comprise some of the European Volvo campaign out of Fuel's Amsterdam operation, but at press time, the details were not available.

A touch point of a different ilk was recently employed by Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB), Chicago. The agency was re-launching Quisp, a Quaker breakfast cereal originally branded by animator Jay Ward in 1965. The cereal already had enough cultural currency to make an Internet-driven sales comeback starting from Quisp.com in 1997, but when FCB creative director Gary Rosenbaum met animation sensei John Kricfalusi of Spumco, a [Macromedia] Flash of inspiration occurred.

"John brought up how cool '60s cartoon cereal commercials were," recalls Rosenbaum. When the latter and copywriter Eric Anderson were given the task of redesigning the package, they decided to create a cliff-hanger adventure on the back of the box; the end of the story was created by Kricfalusi's Spumco in Flash animation and posted on the Quisp Web site. Kricfalusi has been mulling over using Flash to create online ads for some time.

"I find Flash a lot more creative, despite the technical limitations, which are made up for in its ease of use," he says. "I don't know how fast this will get off the ground, but it's obvious: commercials online are a lot cheaper than TV to produce and place; putting commercials on TV can run into the millions of dollars."

Kricfalusi points out that animated TV spots generally cost from two to three hundred thousand dollars per 30 seconds, while the three-minute-long Quisp piece on the Web site cost just a fraction of that; remove the cost of media buys from the equation and the cost of an online spot is nearly negligible.

Of course, the back of a cereal box doesn't have as large an audience as Saturday morning cartoons, but creating fresh content around an animated character long sequestered into the cobwebby bits of the collective unconscious breathes life back into the Quisp brand.