Diamond Marketer Tells Holiday Love Story Online

The Diamond Trading Company is asking “What Would You Do for Love?” this holiday season, in a campaign in which the Web plays a starring role. The integrated effort, designed by JWT, interlinks traditional channels with rich media and user-submitted content.

Traditional elements of the campaign direct consumers to adiamondisforever.com, the URL that the the DeBeers marketing division has long used for its campaigns. On the newly-refreshed site, the story of a business traveler stranded in Minneapolis on Christmas Eve unfolds on a roadmap as he makes his journey home to Chicago to give his wife a diamond necklace. Segments of the decidedly “trains, planes, and automobiles” journey are told through video and audio files.

The rich media site is book-ended by the two TV commercials that aired beginning November 14. One commercial introduces the story, with the husband calling his wife from the shut down airport. The second commercial shows the husband arriving home.

“Instead of telling the beginning, middle and the end, you go to the Web for the middle — it fills in the whole story,” said Ed Evangelista, executive creative director at JWT.

The site was built by iChameleon. Antony Hoffman filmed the two commercials and additional video for the campaign.

The audio clips on the Web site, which sound like an overheard or intercepted conversation, were also used for radio spots.

Besides telling the couple’s story, the site also asks users to submit their own tales in the “What Have You Done for Love Challenge.”

“[The campaign] is literally one person’s fictional story about what he did for love,” JWT executive creative director, Chris D’Rozario, told ClickZ News. “That’s meant to inspire other’s stories.”

Visitors began submitting and voting on stories when the campaign went live last month. After the holidays, one winner from each U.S. state will be selected to receive a diamond necklace. By mid-December, the site had received more than 3,000 entries, and it gets 10,000 unique visitors per day.

The Web is a relatively new medium for the team on the Diamond Trading Company account. “If we didn’t do it this year, we would be way behind,” said Evangelista.