Creating Buzz without Causing Offence

When some campaigns go awry, it’s often due to external sensitivities that, in the passion of the creative moment, sometimes go unacknowledged. We might question how an agency could have overlooked such a thing, but as we know it is all too easy for groupthink to set in. In October 2009, Zeitgeist wrote about one such gaffe, when DDB made a very hard-hitting and extremely controversial ad for WWF, using 9/11 imagery. It’s important to point out that the real story there was more to do with the painful process of admission that DDB went through rather than the ad itself.

In February, the South African film Night Drive arrived in cinemas. An agency by the name of 1984 was responsible for the advertising in its domestic market. To drum up interest, 1984 decided to take a viral approach and distribute fliers in Johannesburg, offering “the best prices for all your body parts and organs”. Naturally this raised concern, as the fliers themselves looked genuine in an amateur way, with the police treating it as a serious matter. Indeed, earlier that month, elsewhere on the continent in Liberia, The Economist reported on crimes where “body parts such as the heart, blood, tongue, lips, genitals and fingertips, all used in sorcery to bring wealth and power, are removed”. Worse still, members of government were being implicated as they looked for anything to give them an advantage ahead of elections. The agency’s parent company swiftly apologised.

It’s a terribly unfortunate tale that sometimes can happen. Agencies are susceptible to this more often than you might think, and the reasons for this are twofold. Think about what agencies are trying to do in the creation and execution of a campaign. Firstly, they are aiming for verisimilitude, especially if the product being sold (in this case a film), is fictional. Secondly, they are trying to get someone’s attention in a marketplace that is incredibly cluttered; increasingly the message needs to be unique to stand out above the fray, even more so with a stacked, year-round movie calendar.

Indeed, film marketing is therefore one of the places you are more likely to come across viral efforts. Triumphs include The Dark Knight, which won an award at Cannes Lions in 2009, and the campaign for the excellent film Inception, $100m of which was spent on viral efforts. One of the best features of this campaign was the treasure hunt they organised around the UK, releasing clues on Facebook that could lead fans to tickets to the premiere. Zeitgeist covered this in its review of summer film marketing activity last year. By contrast, the viral campaign for this year’s Limitless, however, was not seen as successful. The campaign involved two prongs. Zeitgeist remembers images such as the one above gracing the London Underground trains, with actor Bradley Cooper selling his super-drug, with one side-effect being “death”. It was confusing, but the copy was such that if the reader was paying any attention, they would soon realise it was fake, and that the website was Paramount Studios-affiliated. The film’s other main effort, a video of a man controlling the screens of Times Square with his iPhone, met with initial excitement, then puzzlement when it emerged it was to do with the film in question.

What do we learn then? Well, we learn that there is a very fine line between obscurity and popularity, between prominence and offence. We learn that there is no golden rule, no pieces of a jigsaw to assemble that makes the consumer look up and listen. And always, always read The Economist.

Movie Moves

From industry paradigm shifts to Paramount trailers and viral websites…

Zeitgeist has had it’s eye on the UK production company Shine for some time, watching it grow into the powerhouse it is today, all under the stewardship of Elisabeth Murdoch. Elisabeth, married to Matthew Freud of Freud Communications, has seemed to want to keep her distance from the Murdoch dynasty since leaving the fold ten years ago, unlike her brother James, who worked for News Corporation in Asia before taking the helm at Sky in the UK. Indeed, Elisabeth’s husband has – strangely for a man whose career is public relations – made little to no attempt to keep his barbed views of News Corp.’s Fox News to himself, saying he was “shocked and sickened” by the content and bias of the cable network. So it thus came as some surprise to Zeitgeist to learn that a deal was recently completed for Shine to become part of the Murdoch empire for £415m. What this will mean to the independence and creativity of the group remains to be seen. But I suppose if the sustainability-themed Avatar can make it out of the notoriously arch-conservative News Corp leviathan, anything’s possible.

In other news, Netflix has been in the papers again. After announcing it would be partnering with several consumer electronic devices, (Mashable made the analogy of having a Netflix button on your remote control), this week the company announced it was trying to develop a remake of the classic UK TV show House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey starring and David Fincher directing, committing to 26 episodes, “taking it into uncharted territory that would put it in direct competition with HBO and other premium cable channels”, writes Mashable. This will be the first time that the company has commissioned and created its own content, further disrupting models of distribution, which itself is a bit of a house of cards. While Netflix pushes into other companies’ territory, Amazon encroached on Netflix‘s by announcing at the end of last month that they would be offering premium customers access to 5,000 TV shows and movies. Though Reuters points out that moves like these are attempts to “woo” companies like Time Warner and the afore-mentioned News Corp., the reality is more tricky, as the same article points out in the very next paragraph,

Media companies so far are cautious about allowing their content to be used on these types of services because they compete with cable operators that pay a premium to carry TV programs and movies. The fear is that people will drop pricey cable subscriptions — known in the industry as “cord cutting” — in exchange for streaming video offered by Netflix or Amazon for instance.

Yesterday it was reported that Paramount will release a film on DVD and on the peer-to-peer service BitTorrent at the same time, with the latter platform supposedly functioning to incentivise people to then buy the DVD. Might a ten-minute teaser have been better than releasing the entire film? Such a teaser is being provided at the moment by Warner Bros., which recently developed iPad apps for both Dark Knight and Inception, providing the first five minutes of the film for free.

Ten days ago, Facebook announced that it would be getting into the film-rental game, as reported by the FT. This is a broader stroke for Facebook in an effort to create a benevolent ‘walled garden’; an area for users to navigate the web, communicate with who they want and angage in the services they want, without ever having to leave the Facebook environment. Zeitgeist never thought they’d be mentioning the recently-released Chalet Girl on this blog, but Variety reports the film has made an interesting marketing move of releasing an interactive trailer on Facebook, where users have the option of “like”ing the trailer at various points. Peter Buckingham, head of distribution and exhibition at the UK Film Council, sagely points out the novelty of such an exercise for film marketers; “The film industry really has not woken up to how important metadata is”.

There are exceptions, however. This past week saw the release of a trailer for an eagerly-anticipated (by nerds) summer film, directed by JJ Abrams of Star Trek and Lost fame and exec-produced by Steven Spielberg – Super 8. And what is the best way to reach said nerds? Why, firstly by providing a super-nerdy website that doles out microscopic kernels of plot information on the film under the guise of hacking into a computer from the late 1970s, and secondly by releasing said trailer on Twitter (see top image). As Zeitgeist has said before, know your audience.

At the apex of art and commerce

The highly-aniticipated film Tron: Legacy has been building promotional steam for some time now, as Disney has been racheting up the buzz slowly over the past 18 months. Daft Punk’s presence as composers of the film’s score has played no small part in creating awareness ahead of the release. Not only was the act of courting the artists a savvy move on Disney’s part, it has brought the collaboration front and centre with its latest trailer, which doubles as a music video.

In the meantime the film has a highly engaging Facebook presence a la Inception, and recently released tickets for a free 23-minute sneak peek of the movie at London’s Odeon Leicester Square tomorrow night, which Zeitgeist is attending with sweaty palms.

Neuromarketing Explained

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say”

– David Ogilvy

On Wednesday night, part of the Zeitgeist entity found itself at a Holiday Inn. No, it was not part of a dare. The Account Planners Group [APG] had chosen this venue in central London to host a conference on neuroscience, with specific reference to its application in marketing. Neuromarketing involves using tools, tasks or tests from the realm of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to measure non-conscious reactions in the brain to marketing stimuli. The use of the above image was made even more appropriate given that the organiser of these events goes by the name Steve Martin (I kid you not). AdAge recently featured a pretty good article on the subject.

Our host for the evening was Gemma Calvert. As Warwick University notes, “In 1997, Professor Calvert established the world’s first neuromarketing consultancy, Neurosense Limited, which has undertaken numerous fMRI studies for clients in the advertising, marketing and pharmaceutical industries. The company’s clients include Unilever, Viacom Brand Solutionts, GMTV, Omnicom, Quest International and McDonald’s Europe. This expertise has formed the basis for the establishment of a dedicated academic group at WDL which aims to help marketers and manufacturers understand how the brain responds to products/fragrances, brand extensions, packaging design and marketing messages.”

Ms Calvert began by talking of Descartes, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, who espoused philosophies on the inherent superiority of human beings to primates, because we had the rational mind. But then, more recently, in the 90s, some dude came along called Damasio. Damasio claimed that we were at heart (or rather, in brain) emotional beings ruled by emotive impulses. This theory, it turns out, is closer to the truth. While our brains have expanded as we have evolved, our limbic brain sits comfortably over our reptilian one, and our neocortex rests on this. The cortex makes our rational decision for us, while the more base parts of our brain do the instinctive “fight or flight”, “must have sex now” stuff. Unfortunately for those supporting the rational part of our brain however, the cortex makes no decisions without consulting the limbic part, subconsciously. Our brain is unable to tune into all the information it needs to, so sometimes we block out things that we see as extraneous. This is dangerous as it can lead to unexpected dangers down the road (see global recession and the premise of Black Swan). It’s well-illustrated by the following video:

Remarkably, we even rationalise post-hoc, telling ourselves something we know is not true but forcing our rational mind to accept it. There is an excellent article here on the subject of confabulation (link updated 2014). Zeitgeist watched this video last night at the conference and did not believe that there had been a gorilla in the video the first time it was shown. Watching the YouTube video this morning, he now believes this is a different video that does contain bears in both clips. It is very unlikely that he is correct. Ms Calvert also highlighted the fallibility of focus groups, as evinced by the great Mr. Ogilvy at the beginning of this article. One of her more whimsical comments came after her statement that 97% of new products fail in Japan within the first 12 months (there are specific reasons for problems in this region). This despite months of testing, focus groups and general consumer research. Ms Calvert’s opinion was that you were just as – statistically speaking, better – off flipping a coin, as at least with that you had a 50-50 chance. Neuromarketing on the other hand can give you an insight into how consumers actually feel, rather than merely what they are telling you. The application for this study is done through eyetracking, fMRI scans and EEG. MRI involves the rather unnatural state of lying down surrounded by a gigantic magnet. Wearing fibre optic glasses, the subject can be shown pictures, movies, or even be given a joystick to engage on a virtual shopping trip. It can be used to study how a 30-second spot holistically effects the brain. EEG on the other hand can be used to examine how someone feels about something on a second-by-second basis, with a positive or negative timeline.

Ms Calvert also spoke briefly on behavioural economics. Zeitgeist has commented previously on behavioural economics – which, contrary to classical economics, argues that we are not all inherently rational beings making purely rational decisions –  which is a methodology that, according to Ms Calvert, aims to effect large-scale population change. Thinkbox has the pleasure of hosting none other than Ogilvy’s very own Rory Sutherland on the subject on its website, video of which can be found here. These methodologies can help validate and measure effectiveness. It can help divine brand empathy, loyalty, liking and recognition. The findings were most interesting for subjects where the consumer was actually lying to themselves. When Dove tested to see whether they should enter the house cleaning market, those tested with neuromarketing revealed they were very turned off by such a notion, with their brains showing high signs of disinterest and even disgust. In focus groups though they told researchers they would be quite happy to consider buying such a product. Brain imaging better predicts intended purchases than what consumers actually tell researchers. How to reconcile these contrasts? Well perhaps the fact that fully 85% of consumer behaviour is driven by non-conscious awareness is part of it; we are not even aware of most of the decisions we make. Now neuroscientists are. Sounds like a movie I saw this summer…

Marketing Movies

At the height of summer, Hollywood can always be counted on to release its annual glut of rambunctious, noisy films for the gluttonous, rambunctious, noisy masses (read teenagers). Zeitgeist commented previously on the exceptional marketing efforts gone to by Disney and Pixar for “Toy Story 3”. The film was finally released the other week in the UK, having been pushed back to make way for the onslaught of the World Cup. This article will be focussing on four very different films and the differing marketing efforts employed in them; “Eclipse”, “Inception”, “Knight and Day” and “Tron: Legacy”.

The third film in the Twilight saga, “Eclipse”, has recently exploded into cinemas, making $280m in it’s first week at the global box office. In the film, Robert Pattinson’s ‘Edward’ drives around in a pining manner in a Volvo XC60 SUV. The car, owned by China’s Geely created their “most expensive campaign to date to promote its tie-in”, according to Variety. In the series’ sophomore outing Volvo had played on its product placement almost entirely online with their “Come and See What Drives Edward” campaign. In the new film there is another website, “Lost in Forks”, which is being more heavily promoted on TV in a cheesy, Americanised way (this is the ad Zeitgeist saw the other night). The site asks the user to play a game in order to be in with a chance of winning the XC60. The game, however, is interminably boring for all but the most dedicated of Twilight fans (who fortunately for Volvo number in the tens of millions); Zeitgeist lost all interest in entering the competition and having their information captured for Volvo to use in the future. Variety points out “the SUV is also being given away by Burger King as part of the chain’s own ‘Twilight’ tie-in and gives the vehicle a shout-out in its ads.” Even for the first film in the series, in which the Volvo C30 appeared but the brand had “no advertising budget”, the car “received millions of impressions [and] increased consumer traffic through [US] and international dealerships”. It helps that the author of the novels, Stephanie Meyer, had, bizarrely, sprinkled her books with mentions of Volvo.

Volvo took a back seat to Mercedes for product placement in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”, the only product placement example in the film, writes BrandChannel. However, the film’s marketing has far more impressive accolades, namely its integration with Facebook. Although every brand and its uncle sees Facebook advertising as a sine qua non nowadays, the team at Warner Bros. created an imaginative and engaging campaign that helped raise awareness and excitement for a movie shrouded in secrecy. On the UK Facebook fan page for the film, competitions were announced that took place in Brighton, London and other locations. A man, suited and wearing sunglasses, and carrying the silver briefcase showcased in the film, appeared at various locations along with a vague clue or riddle as to where he was. The first person to solve the riddle and find the man was given tickets to the UK premiere. It’s an idea sui generis, and it evidently paid off. Apart from the film opening at No.1 and beating out “Toy Story 3” in its second week to retain its top spot, sometimes almost a hundred people would comment per competition when all was said and done. The great engagement continued in more simple ways when the film opened, with reviews posted from various publications, and asking fans whether they would be seeing the film again…

eConsultancy praised the efforts, saying they produced “a marketer’s dream campaign” (no pun intended I’m sure). The article details how Warner Bros. “went to great pains over its blog outreach campaign, utilising major and minor movie fan sites to help spread titbits of pre-release information.” They conclude with the pithy insight, “It’s worth contrasting this against that similar old media behemoth, the music industry, who have consistently struggled to find a new marketing model that competes with free sharing and piracy.”

All seemed not quite as rosy initially for the Tom Cruise / Cameron Diaz starrer “Knight and Day”, with the New York Times predicting before its release that it would fall short of expectations. The two stars, however, have gamely been showing their faces around the world, and not only at premieres, in this case touring Brazil before spending hours with fans in London. They also showed up at the Tour de France, watching from the side of the road before helping the eventual winner lift the trophy. Very soon the film will have it’s ‘People’s Premiere’ at London’s Somerset House, giving the film the added publicity of having two premieres. Finally, last week the duo showed up on the BBC’s “Top Gear”, driving the show’s ‘reasonably priced car’. The show is still available on iPlayer, and in Zeitgeist’s opinion well worth the watch. This kind of globe-trotting coverage is perfect fodder for the target audience, the kind who like big explosions, fast cars, and lean storylines.

The last film Zeitgeist will be discussing is the release this winter – December 17th in the US – of the second Tron film, “Tron: Legacy”, which, by the time it opens, Disney will have committed “three and a half years priming the audience” for, according to the New York Times. The team at Disney has – much like “Inception” did in a much shorter timeframe – been feeding rabid fans tidbits piece by piece, with the release of a new trailer (see below) at Comic-Con recently, where one arrived at the screening via a themed entryway, a great piece of experiential.

“Marketing campaigns for what the industry calls ‘tent-pole’ movies… have traditionally started about a year before their release in theaters [sic]. Increasingly, there is scarcely enough time… The goal is to make movies feel like must-attend events”.

Multi-channel integration, be it on Facebook as with “Inception” (and as with Disney’s newly purchased Playdom for $760m), through supporting Disney channels as with “Tron: Legacy”, or through mobile games that extend the movie’s universe, will help bolster revenues. However, as digital video recorders like Sky+ in the UK and TiVo in the US continue to erode film’s main piece of publicity – the trailer – and as DVD sales continue to plummet, without much offset from Blu-ray or online avenues, the film industry is increasingly less wary about taking risks when it comes to how films are promoted. One thing is for sure though, sometimes you just can’t beat a great trailer…