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nifty web movies.
Shorts pull in web crowd, in cross-platform coup
By Elizabeth White
The TV ads look like they might be for another summer blockbuster—there’s a car chase, a sexy leading man, a star director.
But then the tagline directs you to a web site.
But to watch what exactly? Another commercial? A short film with exceptional product placement?
Actually a bit of both and perhaps a lot more.
Welcome to BMW’s film series "The Hire," an ad campaign that's something of a first in cross-platform advertising that utilizes the best of TV, in terms of reaching large audiences, and the best of the web, in terms of engaging users.
BMW claims its films have attracted over three-million visitors to bmwfilms.com since the first short debuted on April 26.
During May, Media Metrix listed bmwfilms.com as the 15th highest-rated newcomer for the month, with 787,000 unique visitors.
Nielsen//NetRatings reported traffic as high as 213,000 unique visitors during the week that Wong Kar-Wai’s "The Follow" premiered.
Traffic dropped below the reporting cutoff the following week, and then shot back up to almost 200,000 unique visitors the next week when Guy Ritchie’s "Star," starring Madonna, opened on the site.
And those numbers may not accurately reflect how many people have seen the films.
For one, press coverage has won the series airtime on Bravo and the Independent Film Channel.
In addition, vast numbers have downloaded a BMW interactive film player from bmwfilms.com, which allows them to run the films on their computers at will.
So what exactly are these people watching?
At minimum, "The Hire" is a series of short films starring Clive Owen as a mysterious professional driver of BMW vehicles. Each film is by a different director and each has a unique story line.
But beyond that, the films are a clever experiment in advertising that blurs the lines between product placement, program sponsorship, brand extension, direct marketing and online media.
"A lot of people in the media have tried to classify it. We never saw them as commercials. We saw them as five-minute films," says Kevin Flatt, creative director of Fallon Interactive, the agency that developed the series for BMW North America.
"You don’t see the BMW logo until the end of the film."
At the same time, "The Hire" was conceived of as part of a new brand campaign for BMW North America, and the films are unquestionably commercials in that sense.
The six-minute shorts feature BMWs zipping around city streets and country roads, outrunning and outmaneuvering bad guys in lesser vehicles like Mercedes-Benzes.
"It’s very much a brand thing. Obviously, a good brand sells cars," says Flatt. "You can’t necessarily show what these cars can do in a 30-second spot. But it was not meant to drive up X number of sales."
Putting the films online was a nod to both emerging technology and BMW’s consumers. BMW North America says that 85 percent of its customers go online before making a major purchase.
"We’d been noticing as a trend that people had been moving more online, not just for information but for entertainment," says Flatt.
"The Napster thing was going on, so we thought maybe people would be interested in downloading other things. Most of the things you see out there aren’t that entertaining, so we thought about short films.
"The interesting thing about the web is that it’s self-selective. People aren’t there by accident."
And it’s that self-selective audience that also leads to the next major application of the film series: a direct marketing vehicle with a wide consumer reach.
Both bmwfilms.com and the downloadable film player offer several places for visitors to enter their names and addresses to receive additional information.
"It’s a smart way not only to get buzz but also capture information," says Tim Hanlon, vice president/director of emerging contacts at Starcom Worldwide.
"If they just wanted to make movies, they can sponsor a film festival and sell tickets."
"The shrewd thing about [BMW Films] is that they are all about driving traffic to a web site, and by extension gaining qualified leads, and that’s the precursor to measurability. It’s not just for NetRatings, but names-and-addresses acquisition," says Hanlon.
"And that’s just with the existing technology. This is a proxy for what will be a much more robust consumer opt-in model. If you’re a marketer who wants to push the needle now, the logical combo is web and TV."
June 25, 2001
© 2001 Media Life-
Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.
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