To launch the new Buick Verano, Buick incorporated the Verano into the highest-rated prime-time reality show, The Celebrity Apprentice.

Along with Actv8, we created an unexpected and entirely new interactive experience: The Celebrity Apprentice App, which actually listens to your TV and triggers custom content on your device.

During the episode, our Celebrity Apprentice App provided exclusive content that augmented the show’s storyline at key moments. We wanted to make sure that the content wasn’t just Buick forcing itself down users’ throats, but rather that it made the show more entertaining.We even invited viewers to enter the story by having Donald Trump himself personally comment on their decision-makings skills in custom-scripted videos that viewers could then post to their Facebook walls and other social networks.

The campaign, which launched March 1st, continued until our March 11th episode. The limited timeframe was to avoid revealing spoilers of the current TV show in our advertising before the episode. Otherwise, we could have jeopardized the entire season’s outcome.

The campaign included OLA, email, Facebook display ads, Buick Twitter and Facebook posts and a Buick event page on Facebook.

The OLA approach was twofold: 1) For sites not affiliated with NBC.com, we wanted to get users to download the app to interact with the show. To lure them to download, we offered a sweepstakes to win tickets to the final show of The Celebrity Apprentice in New York City. And, 2) get users on NBC.com to commit to tuning in to the show via the Facebook event page (due to legal issues, we could not point users from NBC.com to download the app).

The campaign was a success. With only 10 days of media pushing to it, the app achieved almost 10,000 downloads and is still counting (further metrics forthcoming). The campaign seeded the name of the new Buick; it introduced the Buick to an entirely new audience; and it affiliated itself with the highest-rated prime-time reality show on TV.