The New York Times is running an article about a unique partnership between Jeep, Activision, and Rolling Stone magazine. With the release of Activation's "Tony Hawk's Underground 2" upcoming, it was determined to "share" Tony Hawk's marketing talent to hawk (pun intended) the Jeep Wrangler and the new video game at the same time. It seems that the Wrangler will appear in the video game, so the synergy seems complete.

What does Rolling Stone magazine have to do with all this? How about special content in their magazine and 5 separate web sites? Wow.

Here's a snippet:

“The power is in the hands of consumers; you have to get them involved and reach them on a lot of different levels,” said Gary Armstrong, chief marketing officer at Wenner Media in New York, which publishes Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal and Us Weekly.

That is why the program will appear not only on the Rolling Stone Web site (rollingstone.com/tonysjeep), but also on Web sites for eBay (ebay.com/jeepwrangler), Jeep (jeep.com), the Tony Hawk Foundation (tonyhawkfoundation.org) and the new Tony Hawk video game (tonyhawksproject8.com).

“Instead of a broad approach, placing ads in a lot of magazines to get the coverage, we want to go deeper, focus in on a select group of magazines and do more than just run ads,” said Mike Fulkerson, director for global brand management at Activision in Santa Monica, Calif., who works with the media agency MediaVest, part of the Starcom MediaVest group unit of the Publicis Groupe.

In this instance, “everybody fits,” Mr. Fulkerson said, adding: “Jeep is a brand our audience responds well to. Rolling Stone has been working to make sure all the brands, all the interests, are pulled together.”

At the same time, Mr. Fulkerson said, all those involved want to avoid the program seeming too commercialized — or, as he described it, “sales-y” — to avoid turning off the intended audience.