Honda rolled its new hybrid vehicle the Insight into U.S. showrooms earlier this year, and agency RPA has teamed with Yahoo to mount a highly integrated marketing campaign designed to make young, eco-conscious, cash-strapped drivers aware that there’s a new fuel-saving alternative to Toyota’s Prius.

The centerpiece of the online campaign is a Yahoo-hosted microsite that’s intended to provide an engaging introduction to the new model rather than a hard-sell sales lot experience.

“We were aiming to make an entertaining online showroom that equated to the driving experience for the Honda Insight,” says Yahoo regional vice president Kari Allen. “Honda needed a partner that could create engaging experiences for auto shoppers and at the same time deliver targeted media at scale, create buzz and offer other assets.”

Chief among those is a clever (and tricky) online driving game that also manages to teach users about the fuel-efficient technology built into the car. Drivers can press a dashboard “ECO” button that kicks in systems to optimize functions like braking and acceleration for better gas mileage and to get a few heads-up indicators on their gauges that register when they’re driving less than efficiently.

The online ECO driving game that Yahoo built for the microsite conveys some sense of how this tech works while engaging visitors with the site and the brand. Players use their keyboards to drive a digital Insight efficiently, obeying speed limits, braking efficiently to avoid other traffic, and trying to pick up as many green leaf symbols as they can—a link to the dashboard eco rating the Insight provides after every drive.

Yahoo also created original video content for the microsite in the form of seven Webisodes. The videos, scripted and using actors and clocking in at about five minutes’ length, purport to show two teams of ordinary young drivers testing the Honda Insight in a race to see who can get from Honda’s Torrance CA headquarters to New Orleans with the best fuel efficiency rating. (Yes, they have wacky adventures along the way.)

Allen says the aim of the videos, uploaded one per week starting with the April 22 launch, was to educate consumers about the Insight’s features in a way that was more entertaining than a straight model walkthrough but more focused that a user-generated video blog post.

Of course, what scripted Webisodes gain in focus they sometimes give up in authenticity. Allen says she thinks the videos manage to seem like short entertainment with some light product placement for Honda.

Personally I don’t think anyone’s going to mistake these for anything other than a soft-edged commercial. They’re not laugh-out-loud funny, they don’t have the rough-edged credibility of UGC, and I’d be surprised if they were widely shared or embedded. But if you’re in the market for a new car and interested in a hybrid, they are a more entertaining way to learn about the Insight’s cargo space, Bluetooth connectivity, sat-nav system and iPod USB ports than a print or online brochure. And of course, you get to see the ECO system in action.

But beyond Yahoo’s game-building and content-creation capabilities, Honda has also leveraged a number of the portal’s other assets for this site, including green content from and placement on Yahoo Auto, one of the most highly trafficked car sites on the Web. Visitors can also click through to Yahoo Video to watch news clips about the Insight from third-party auto sites.

Yahoo is also running display and search ads around the Insight for the length of the campaign (through June) and optimizing display ad placement to swap out lower-click messages with those that perform better. The search campaign for the Insight is also making use of Yahoo’s pilot Rich Ads in Search format, which places expandable video directly into pay-per-click ads at the top of the results page, making it easy for users to run clips without clicking away from their search.

But another interesting facet of the campaign Honda and its agency have built on Yahoo is a new willingness on Yahoo’s part to direct visitors off the portal to sites it doesn’t run—in this case to the official Honda Insight site at automobiles.honda.com/insight-hybrid/, but also to the Facebook page Honda built for the car, which should see some Yahoo-built Insight apps in the near future.

“One strategy Yahoo is embracing this year and going forward is to be more of an open network,” Allen says. “At the microsite, we’ve tried to bring the user all the way through the purchase funnel, starting with awareness—people who are just looking at the car for the first time—to people who are truly interested in buying an Insight.”

Honda rolled its new hybrid vehicle the Insight into U.S. showrooms earlier this year, and agency RPA has teamed with Yahoo to mount a highly integrated marketing campaign designed to make young, eco-conscious, cash-strapped drivers aware that there’s a new fuel-saving alternative to Toyota’s Prius.

The centerpiece of the online campaign is a Yahoo-hosted microsite that’s intended to provide an engaging introduction to the new model rather than a hard-sell sales lot experience.

“We were aiming to make an entertaining online showroom that equated to the driving experience for the Honda Insight,” says Yahoo regional vice president Kari Allen. “Honda needed a partner that could create engaging experiences for auto shoppers and at the same time deliver targeted media at scale, create buzz and offer other assets.”

Chief among those is a clever (and tricky) online driving game that also manages to teach users about the fuel-efficient technology built into the car. Drivers can press a dashboard “ECO” button that kicks in systems to optimize functions like braking and acceleration for better gas mileage and to get a few heads-up indicators on their gauges that register when they’re driving less than efficiently.

The online ECO driving game that Yahoo built for the microsite conveys some sense of how this tech works while engaging visitors with the site and the brand. Players use their keyboards to drive a digital Insight efficiently, obeying speed limits, braking efficiently to avoid other traffic, and trying to pick up as many green leaf symbols as they can—a link to the dashboard eco rating the Insight provides after every drive.

Yahoo also created original video content for the microsite in the form of seven Webisodes. The videos, scripted and using actors and clocking in at about five minutes’ length, purport to show two teams of ordinary young drivers testing the Honda Insight in a race to see who can get from Honda’s Torrance CA headquarters to New Orleans with the best fuel efficiency rating. (Yes, they have wacky adventures along the way.)

Allen says the aim of the videos, uploaded one per week starting with the April 22 launch, was to educate consumers about the Insight’s features in a way that was more entertaining than a straight model walkthrough but more focused that a user-generated video blog post.

Of course, what scripted Webisodes gain in focus they sometimes give up in authenticity. Allen says she thinks the videos manage to seem like short entertainment with some light product placement for Honda.

Personally I don’t think anyone’s going to mistake these for anything other than a soft-edged commercial. They’re not laugh-out-loud funny, they don’t have the rough-edged credibility of UGC, and I’d be surprised if they were widely shared or embedded. But if you’re in the market for a new car and interested in a hybrid, they are a more entertaining way to learn about the Insight’s cargo space, Bluetooth connectivity, sat-nav system and iPod USB ports than a print or online brochure. And of course, you get to see the ECO system in action.

But beyond Yahoo’s game-building and content-creation capabilities, Honda has also leveraged a number of the portal’s other assets for this site, including green content from and placement on Yahoo Auto, one of the most highly trafficked car sites on the Web. Visitors can also click through to Yahoo Video to watch news clips about the Insight from third-party auto sites.

Yahoo is also running display and search ads around the Insight for the length of the campaign (through June) and optimizing display ad placement to swap out lower-click messages with those that perform better. The search campaign for the Insight is also making use of Yahoo’s pilot Rich Ads in Search format, which places expandable video directly into pay-per-click ads at the top of the results page, making it easy for users to run clips without clicking away from their search.

But another interesting facet of the campaign Honda and its agency have built on Yahoo is a new willingness on Yahoo’s part to direct visitors off the portal to sites it doesn’t run—in this case to the official Honda Insight site at automobiles.honda.com/insight-hybrid/, but also to the Facebook page Honda built for the car, which should see some Yahoo-built Insight apps in the near future.

“One strategy Yahoo is embracing this year and going forward is to be more of an open network,” Allen says. “At the microsite, we’ve tried to bring the user all the way through the purchase funnel, starting with awareness—people who are just looking at the car for the first time—to people who are truly interested in buying an Insight.”