Harman Consumer Division has appointed digital agency VerticPortals to create and implement an interactive on-line training solution, aimed at helping sales employees in Best Buy to better understand the in-car audio equipment brand Infinity.

New York City, NY (EMWNews) July 25, 2008 — VerticPortals (www.verticportals.com) has been appointed to implement an interactive training solution to help Best Buy employees learn the benefits of Harman Consumer Division’s Infinity product. They have already been working successfully with Harman over the past three years, putting together digital campaigns in business-to-consumer, business-to-employee and business-to-business environments.

The task was awarded to VerticPortals by Herman Sperling, Group Vice President, Marketing at Harman International, who said “We needed a strong company with a history of being able to execute strong campaigns, with an excellent number of employees being both educated and entertained. VerticPortals’ depth of experience, level of professionalism, and ability to come up with innovative solutions to our problems meant that they were the obvious choice. Their clever edutainment approach really resonated and grabbed our attention, meaning that we were able to succeed in our dual goals of generating awareness as well as generating demand.”

The concept was built around VerticPortals’ underlying communication principle of Edutainment. Edutainment is a way of stimulating and awakening the employee by combining education and entertainment. The use of sound, video, interactivity, animations and text are all important tools in this effort. This captures the employee’s attention before drawing them to the benefits of the Harman in-car audio equipment, and how to convey these benefits to the in-store customer.

Sebastian Jespersen, CEO of VerticPortals, added “Creating an educational tool is not enough — it does not matter if you are a Fortune 500 company employee or a member of the general public, you want to be entertained online or you lose interest with the targeted campaign material — hence, we injected rich media to let the customer be both engaged and informed. The appointment is a clear indication of how successful our Edutainment solution has proven to be already in generating the tangible results Harman strives for.”

Headquartered in Copenhagen, VerticPortals is also based in New York and Skopje, and counts Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Carlsberg and Nestle amongst their clients.