"The Art of the Heist" (McKinney-Silver): Audi staged a labyrinthine cross-country hunt for a new 2006 A3 "stolen" from its Park Avenue showroom. More than 500,000 people tracked the heist online and through live events, resulting in 10,000 dealer leads.
"We were faced with introducing a premium compact car [A3] to the U.S. market, a segment that no German manufacturer has ever succeeded in before. It wasn't about coming up with something that would have the loudest voice, but the voice that would engage our customer, a well-established younger person with a high income.
There were some people in the company who couldn't quite understand a three-month, real-time thriller that would take spontaneous plot twists and turns. I remember the marketing department had to educate people internally that gaming was now a bigger industry than the movie industry and we could use it as a tool to really engage our target audience. In situations like this, where it's hard for people to wrap their heads around something so new, it's important to give the business thinking behind it.
One of the scariest things about the entire campaign was whether people were really going to get into this. We had no guarantee. We became much more comfortable when we had barely seeded the heist, and we found there had already been six or seven Web sites set up to track it. There was this real frenzy. People were going to the dealership to see the broken window; they were taking their own photos and posting them on their Web sites. There was a giddy 'Wow, it's really happening' excitement. But we needed to maintain a game face. In order for something like this to work, everyone at the company had to act as if the car had been stolen, to keep it as real as possible. The joke internally was that it would have been so much easier to do a few TV and print ads. But that wouldn't have been nearly as rewarding."
"The Gamekillers" (BBH): This multimedia campaign coaches dudes on how to pick up chicks without getting intercepted by one of 14 archetypal "gamekillers."
"The thing with the young male consumer is you really need to do things he hasn't seen before, both in terms of content and how you bring it to him. A couple of years ago, we did a campaign showing an anthropomorphized armpit getting all the women. To be honest, the armpit was pretty shocking--some people had violently happy reactions, others were not such fans. What we learned was that it's the polarizing reaction that made the campaign so powerful, that really got people talking.
To drive growth for our Axe antiperspirant stick, our agency came back to us with the 'gamekillers'--the idea that in the mating game, there are forces that work against you, and the way to beat them is to keep your cool. There are characters like Man Candy, the Mother Hen, and the Drama Queen. We reacted to it so strongly because they took a truth everybody knows about but gave new language for it. We knew it would work when we started showing people in our company, and the first thing they would start telling you about was a story of when their game was killed or what kind of gamekiller they were. I'm probably the One-Upper. And to be honest with you, I've played Sensitivo once or twice in my life.
Since the gamekillers is inherently a discussion-worthy topic, we wanted to make long-form entertainment that would seed the vernacular we'd created. In February, we did a one-hour half-reality, half-scripted unbranded TV show on MTV called The Gamekillers, and we also did a spoof lecture series with Mo Rocca on college campuses where he played a professor. In order to be successful with this audience, I have to take risks, so in some ways it alleviates the pressure because it's an imperative."
"My Life. My Card: The Directors Series" (multiple): Legendary and precocious filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, M. Night Shyamalan, and Wes Anderson, direct two-minute minifilms.
"We look to be associated with people of substance, whose success is based on real achievement, not just temporary success. Last year, when the Academy Awards and the Tribeca Film Festival were coming up, we got to thinking: 'People want stories, so why don't we bring some of the best storytellers in the industry and ask them to tell their story?'
Email
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
