Susie Rossick, manager of Acura advertising, tells Marketing Daily that the digital buy will hone in on sites popular with 25-to-34 year olds. "We have upped our percentage of digital spend higher than we have ever done for Acura, because this group spends much more time online than Baby Boomers," she says. "So we're doing things on Pitchfork, Bleacher Report, and Mashable, for example. We are doing homepage takeovers on MSN and Yahoo." The automaker is advertising on Xbox Live, Pandora and Good, and showing creative on YouTube, as well.

The ILX launch is important for Acura because the brand is still trying to recover its bearings after last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan crushed the sales momentum it had begun to build in the U.S. market. And, according to Acura brand executives, they’re still trying to capture a measure of respect.

“Even with restricted inventories, we still sold more cars last year than Lincoln and Cadillac and Volvo and Audi,” Mike Accavitti, Acura’s U.S. CMO, told me. “Audi gets all these accolades but we sell more cars than them. We’re 4th [in U.S. luxury sales volumes] this year even before high volumes of our 2 new products, ILX and [a new version of the RDX utility vehicle], have gotten onto dealer lots.”