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The D‟Ieteren projects did not take up much time to accomplish, but they are nevertheless very interesting: for these projects, I was really involved into the newest advertising technologies that were available at that time. In fact, they were so new that even Jean- Pierre (who calls himself the “Internet and New Media Expert” on his business cards) did not quite know how these technologies worked.

3.3.1. VolksWagen SMS & Win action

DDB Live, the Event section of DDB Belgium, wanted to do a special action at a dozen events between August and November: they were planning to put a candy vending machine at the event‟s showroom. On the vending machine, a large message would be printed: “send an SMS with the letters “VW” in it to the number you receive when pushing the button”. Each visitor who pressed on the button would receive a free package of mints, with the VW logo and a phone number printed on it. Now, every user who sent the code “VW” to the phone number was supposed to receive a message back with a secret access code for a special VolksWagen contest. At home, this user would be able to test this personalised code on a special VW contest microsite. The winner would receive a free test weekend with a new VW sports car model.

Carole, who was responsible for this action at the event section, did not quite know how she could set up the technical aspects. Therefore, she asked Jean-Pierre to find a way to put up a link between the vending machine and a cellphone. Since Jean-Pierre did not exactly know how to do this, he ordered me to research possible solutions for this problem.

I started looking around on the Internet for companies who offered this kind of service. After a while, I found three companies. When I showed the results of my research to Jean-Pierre, he remembered that he had heard good things about one of my search results: a company called Netsize. Therefore, he told me to contact them, explain the whole situation, and demand two quotations: in the first one, users needed to pay the costs of the two SMS messages themselves, and in the second one, VW would pay the costs of both the messages.

By means of a couple of telephone conversations, I came into contact with Bart van den Notelaer, manager at Netsize. He told me that setting up a push (user sends code to SMS central) + pull (SMS central recognizes the code and automatically sends back another message) + code database (each user receives a personal code in the second message)

connection was quite expensive, especially when VW wanted to pay all the costs. He also explained the technical aspects of the SMS-to-central-and-back-transfer.

A couple of days later, I received the quotations I had asked for (called Prijsofferte 1 and 2), and forwarded them to Carole. Because she (and Jean-Pierre) did not understand the quotation‟s structure and content, I had to explain to them how everything worked. Because VolksWagen did not want the possible users to pay any money for sent and received messages, the whole operation would finally cost around €4000.

I never heard if they had used my Netsize connection or quotations, until the very last day of my traineeship. That day, I accidentally heard from an intern that DDB Live had ordered quotation number two. Sadly, the results of the first try-outs showed that only 60 persons per night had tried to receive a personalised code on their cellphones – while there were around a thousand people invited.

3.3.2. VW parking game

Next to the SMS-advertising experiment, I have been involved into another new advertising technology experiment for Volkswagen: sponsored video games for cellphones. Volkswagen had invented a new technology for people who do not know how to park a car properly: with the help of sensors and a computer, the car will now park itself, without any help of the driver. In order to promote this new feature, the VW account team wanted to set up a microsite, featuring the “VW parking game”. In this interactive flash-game, users needed to park their car in a parking full of cars, without touching any of these cars. Jean-Pierre liked the idea, but he wanted to test a new technology for this project: establishing the link between Internet and modern cellphones.

Again, I had to research how this could be executed. In order to do this, I contacted Bart van den Notelaer at Netsize again, since this company seemed to be one of the pioneers on this domain. He told me that Netsize could set up a WAP link between the VW microsite and a modern mobile phone: by implementing a special webpage on the microsite where users could fill in their phone number and –model, the mobile game would be transferred from the microsite‟s server to a user‟s cellphone by means of the WAP mobile Internet network. However, in order to do this, the “VW parking game” had to be transformed from a scripted Flash-version (as it was planned at that moment) to a scripted JAVA version, since mobile phones do not support the Flash scripting language.

Bart from Netsize told me that this conversion technology was state-of-the-art. In fact, there was not even a company in Belgium that could fulfil this task. Therefore, Bart gave me the contact persons of two tiny French webdesign companies. I contacted both companies, and

asked for a quotation. However, it seemed like the info that I had provided to these companies was not sufficient enough to draw up a quotation: they needed info on the number of frames that the Flash game had, the number of “panes”, moving objects, Flash version, and a whole range of other technical features.

Since I did not know what to answer to these questions, I asked Jean-Pierre for help. As the Flash game was not in development yet, he could not give an answer to any of these questions either. Therefore, Jean-Pierre told me that “he would take it over from here on”. A couple of weeks later, I found out that he had dropped the project. Instead, the VW account team had decided to put up another project that revolved around Youtube…

3.3.3. Research for VW and Audi

Every six months, Jean-Pierre visits the VolksWagen and Audi headquarters, in order to give a presentation about the current online advertising status of Audi & VW‟s main competitors. This time, he asked me to do the research, and create a PowerPoint presentation, containing all the advertising campaigns that I could find for as many competitors as possible.

This was not easy, since it is hard to research on banner campaigns: banners are not a “static” medium, as a website is mostly showing another banner, every time you visit the same page. Therefore, I decided to focus on new microsite campaigns. I started my research with drawing up a list of all the possible car manufacturing brands that I knew. With the help of Tim and Jean-Pierre, who completed the list, I soon had a list of the most important competitors. My next step was the investigation of these brands‟ advertising agencies‟ websites. In this way, I found a couple of banner campaigns. Finally, I checked the brand website for each competitor, and found a whole range of microsites for every brand. I took a screenshot of every interesting campaign, and bundled these screenshots in a PowerPoint presentation (called “automobile & online”). Jean-Pierre was satisfied with the result, as he did not change anything in the PowerPoint file, before he left to the client‟s headquarters.