Storytelling on Steroids: 10 stories that hijacked the pop culture conversation by John Weich

Author:John Weich
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: BIS Publishers
Published: 2014-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

THE HIRE

THE HIJACK: BRAND STORYTELLING

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THE HIJACKER: BMW, FALLON, ANONYMOUS CONTENT & RSA FILMS

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THE LEGACY: THE PROTO NONTRADITIONAL ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN[48]

Long before there were iPads and smart phones, and a decade before TV and studio executives converted their monotheistic models into more interactive and transmedial ones, there was The Hire by BMW Films. The Hire was a series of short online films, or webisodes, created by luxury German carmaker BMW from 2001 to 2002. The series brought together an ensemble of top-flight directorial talent and starred the then-rising actor Clive Owen as the driver-fixer who could maneuver himself out of even the stickiest situations. Always behind the wheel of a BMW, of course.

With its cinematic flair and big-ticket budget, The Hire epitomized the idea of advertising as entertainment, or advertainment. But it was more than that. By investing heavily in the type of films its target audience could appreciate, BMW heralded a new era of branded content. Why blanket the market with traditional marketing messages hoping someone will bite when you can upload provocative content to a designated URL and entice people to come to you? If you build it well enough, they will come. These may sound like everyday options for marketing directors today, but back in 2001, feature-style branded films with no distribution weren’t even on the table.

By 2001 the time was ripe for something like this to happen. The Internet was firmly rooted in our lives and tech-savvy creatives were starting to crowd a branding space formerly dominated by advertising agencies alone. As mentioned in the introduction, ad agencies needed to find an antidote to all these dot.coms, and they wholeheartedly added storytelling to their communication arsenal. And in the early aughts, the best storytellers of a generation were in the process of transforming Hollywood.

It didn’t take a hard sell to get great directors on board. In 2001 professional multi-talents, so-called Slashies, were being given free rein to help brands navigate the new digital era.[49] In film, they usually took the form of the writer-director. These were men—yes, mostly men—like David Chase (The Sopranos), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, American Beauty, True Blood), David Fincher (MTV, Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network) and Spike Jonze (MTV, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) who emerged from the bowels of MTV and were raised on the ambitions of cable TV channels like HBO. These writers-directors-producers-entrepreneurs felt equally sanguine behind the camera shooting low-budget documentaries as they did producing big budget films; writing TV dramas or filming commercials for Converse; collaborating with Björk or launching their own production companies. A few even had a talent for acting. The studios, charmed by their box office exploits, gave them extraordinary license to tap into the millennial zeitgeist.

BMW was the first major brand to give these Slashies free rein in the commercial arena. With The Hire, BMW Films didn’t ask these guys to play by the traditional rules of advertising. Instead, they gave them carte blanche to tell BMW’s story their way. It was the beginning of a new storytelling era in marketing.

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