In August 1999, ZDNet, the world's largest technology portal, hired Barrett Marketing to project manage the development of the "The Future Home" microsite - a website that was developed in conjunction with the award winning television series "This Old House" and the Ziff-Davis Publishing magazine, PC Computing. The goal of the microsite was to provide value-added content focusing on state-of-the-art home technology solutions to homeowners looking to furnish, upgrade, or redesign their home using automated products and technologies.
The Future Home microsite was created to highlight and feature a home renovation project from the "This Old House" series showing a home in Billerica, MA. The microsite content included videotape clips from "This Old House", detailed floor plans of the renovated home, how-to information so that site visitors and television viewers could implement solutions in their own homes and links to online retailers that sold the products featured.
The Future Home microsite also offered viewers the opportunity to take a virtual "tour" of a home-of-the-future. The home-of-the-future provided a peek into the future showing site visitors and TV viewers 21st century home networking, automation, entertainment centers and home office accessories. Technical and product information, articles of interest, and how-to information were provided as value added content. Visitors were able to participate in online forums and submit questions regarding home renovation and installation of home technology products.
Barrett Marketing's charter was to work with the ZDNet sales team, PC Computing, and the producers of This Old House to secure sponsorships with a wide variety of companies such as 800.com, Microsoft, 3Com and RealEstate.com. Barrett Marketing worked with each sponsor to aggregate educational, technical and product information and develop co-marketing programs to promote and drive traffic to the microsite. In addition, Barrett Marketing worked with the producers of This Old House and the promotions staff at WGBH-TV/Boston to create co-marketing and cross-promotional opportunities. To drive traffic to the microsite and generate qualified leads for the sponsors, traditional print, online, and broadcast advertising; emails; email newsletters and a sweepstakes program were used to drive registration. Metrics were established to gauge the success of the project and reports were generated on a weekly basis for the all sponsors to help them measure the program's return on investment.
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