When it comes to interactive tie-ins with live events, there are two schools of thought. You can basically fish where the fish are and link your digital content to Web sites that are already seeing traffic from the event. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for building your own fishing hole and controlling both the experience and the visitors.

Last year, Totino’s Pizza Rolls took a fairly sedate approach to its sponsorship of a decidedly non-sedate event: the ESPN Winter X Games for extreme sports fans, held annually in Aspen CO. The General Mills-owned brand created TV spots and print ads that drove viewers—mostly 13-to-17 year old males– to a Totino’s-branded page on the ESPN.com site. There they were able to vote on their favorite moments from the games and to enter a sweepstakes to win a Jeep patriot packed with sports gear. Totino’s also used competing pro snowboarder Danny Kass as a brand ambassador, putting a logo on his board and posting his daily blog entries on the branded page.

But in its second year of X Games sponsorship, Totino’s decided to give those same young males a more engaging, more direct insider experience and set it up for them to “crash” the 2008 Winter X Games.

“One of the biggest things we learned after the first campaign was the importance of being relevant to our target audience,” says Jason Bennicoff, associate marketing manager for Totino’s. Last year’s sweeps grand prize of a fully loaded Jeep Liberty was something “anyone and everyone would have entered to win,” he says. But attractive as it was, that all-ages prize didn’t have specific appeal for the 13-to-17 consumer market Totino’s was aiming at, and in fact seemed irrelevant to them.

So this year Totino’s X Games promotion is offering something better tailored to that segment: an all-expense-paid trip for four to next year’s Winter X Games.

Ken and Den Webisode

The approach to the games was different this year, too. Instead of finding another brand ambassador among the X Games competitors, Totino’s and the agencies responsible for the promotion, Publicis Modem and Dialog East, recruited two friends of Kass’, Den and Ken Buongiorno, and followed their road trip from their New Jersey home to this year’s games.

Driving their grandmother’s Jaguar and carrying a microwave oven and a trunk full of Totino’s Pizza Rolls, the Buongiorno brothers kept a video diary of both the trip to Aspen and their time at the games, which ran from January 24 to 27, posting clips to the Totino’s Web site at http://www.totinos.com/winterxgames.

The clips have the look and feel of home movies, but in effect they’re pretty highly produced; at one point, grandma’s Jag gets trashed by bears, and an awful lot of the merchants in Aspen seem very willing to accept hundreds of dollars’ worth of Totino’s coupons for expensive snow apparel. But they do convey the sense of the best road trip you’ve ever been on and give a backstage feel to the coverage of the X Games themselves. And of course, they all feature either the Totino’s logo or the product

That insider experience was the whole aim of the Totino’s Web site for this year’s games. “It was designed for the way teens navigate,” Bennicoff says. “Working with Dialog, we realized that teens don’t navigate a site the way other people do. They want to roll over items and discover the site for themselves, rather than having points laid out for them in a traditional menu.”

The Web site design reflected that aim to build appeal for young males. Rather than navigating by clicking on a set of links at the left or right, visitors must move around the site and explore, clicking on icons to see road photos, play video, download MP3 music, or move to Ken and Den’s MySpace page, which amassed 660 friends by the time the X Games finished up. New content was added to the right, and visitors who had been to the site once found their view centered on that new content when they next returned.

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