"Entertain me and I'll listen to you" is the new mantra of the empowered consumer who's willing to interact with your brand if its presence is subtle and the payoff for them is real. Phil Radford looks at branded entertainment, product placement and the art of the heist.

Automotive advertising follows a pretty standard formula: sports car negotiating dangerous curves on mountain road, small car zipping into tight city parking space, large prestige car driving up to country club as the camera pans across its amphibious panels -- cue the tagline, "Because you deserve it".

German carmaker Audi decided it was all a bit on the dull side and, when it came to last year's US launch of the new A3, it was ready to do something different. New York-based branded entertainment outfit Campfire, in collaboration with creative agency McKinney & Silver, offered something so dissimilar it bore very little resemblance to advertising and captured the world media's imagination.

 

The art of a good story

The A3 is a small car with a reasonably big price tag and it was entering territory other models had failed in. It was important, therefore, to establish its unique proposition in the marketing strategy right upfront. The solution was the ‘The Art of the Heist' -- a multifaceted and elaborate example of new marketing. Heist took up where shows such as the hugely popular Kiefer Sutherland vehicle, 24, left off.

 

Heist was a scripted production, with the Audi A3 at the centre. It begins with the theft of a number of the new Audis before their launch date. Through a dedicated website, multiplatform messaging, TV, blogs and forums, some unconventional outdoor and key live events, Heist developed into a compelling, ever-twisting story of high-tech espionage and murder with the car and its technological trappings at the centre. The purpose? To build the marque's ‘Never follow' positioning and expose motivated consumers to the vehicle's capabilities. Not only could people interact and influence the storyline across platforms, some of the most involved fans were even written into the story. TV spots and print ads were run to encourage people to join in and help recover the thieved A3s.

At last month's Engage 2006 conference in Singapore, Campfire founding partner Steve Wax said Heist webcasts were critical to the strategy of immersing consumers completely in the story and the vehicle. "For these webcasts, we recruited real Heist fans and sent them on retrieval missions accompanied by (key character) Nisha, attempting to recover one of the memory cards hidden in the A3s touring the country," said Wax.

The Audi A3 launch by Campfire was a highly sophisticated example of what many marketers are wising up to: that it's not enough to take branded messages to where your consumers are. Getting between consumers and the content they enjoy is losing its impact, but if the brand becomes or enables the content they consume, you are in a different league altogether.

Short attention spans

So why then, when we are constantly told that interruption advertising is on its last legs, would consumers not only elect to sit through a few seconds of advertising but actually interact with an advertiser such as Audi for a prolonged period across several different media?

Universal McCann's Jonathan Thurlow offers some insight. "Through research, we can see that (traditional) channels are losing their efficiency," he said. "We see a decrease in attention levels." What marketers call ‘clutter' is the mix of available alternative media in the home environment, and the inclination not to engage exclusively with any of them. 

‘Entertainment snacking' has become an obsessive habit. Technological advances in time shift TV such as Tivo, yet to hit Singapore, have assisted audiences in slipping the leash of appointment TV. According to Fremantle Media Senior VP for Integrated Marketing (Americas) Keith Hindle, "once people buy these boxes, their viewership drops through the floor. Technology makes a shift inevitable."  

Asking consumers to treat a brand in fiction credibly is gaining more credence. Many marketers have become skilled at either aligning a brand so closely with a dramatic or comedic entertainment moment that its place appears entirely natural, or inserting the brand or brand value so subtly we don't even notice we are being sold to. This is simply a more artistically-attuned variation to an age-old theme of product endorsement. This is the territory of product placement, another growth area in non-traditional advertising particularly in Hollywood, but now also starting to tickle the interest of local marketers.

 

The Singapore perspective

The city-state's limited audience size means diminished opportunities for marketers to integrate brands into entertainment compared with their Western counterparts. However, global film releases offer a platform for global brand values, and marketers usually attempt to integrate these into comprehensive local marketing plans.

Performance Motors cornered the lawn at Fort Canning Park to launch its premier of The Italian Job, which starred the MINI. British Airways laid out a fully-branded gala premier event when Die Another Day, part of the original product placement honey pot -- the James Bond franchise -- hit town. Nokia recently organised an elaborate Orchard Road escapade to coincide with the launch of The Island.

Marketers have also taken the initiative with a limited number of local film productions.  Goh Joo Hin Foods took one look at the script for I Not Stupid Too and pursued a "new and alternative way of gaining brand exposure" for its New Moon abalone products. As other marketing elements were needed to support this product placement initiative, Goh Joo Hin integrated the launch with a philanthropic initiative at a local children's home.

TV clearly offers fertile territory, and MediaCorp argues its in-house production arm has enabled it to move ahead of other markets where branded entertainment initiatives have to be coordinated between networks and production houses. Even so, VP of Airtime Sales & Marketing Eric Lynge sees "only a slice of the more proactive marketers exploring branded entertainment options -- there is a huge upside for growth".

Johnson & Johnson brand Acuvue set local best-practice standards with its MTV-organised ‘Get Spotted' initiative late last year. Aspirant teenagers were offered thirty seconds of fame in a VJ bake-off. Here, the link between the product (contact lenses) and the show's dynamic (a desire to look cool) was kept to the subliminal. The brand backed out of the limelight and restricted its appearance to advertising slots either side of the show. According to Regional Marketing Manager Lee Jui Shiang, "we just left it to the individual to make the connection."

If you're game

With males aged 18 to 35 now spending an average of four times longer playing games than watching TV -- according to in-game advertising enabler Massive's CEO Mitch Davis -- it's getting hard to ignore the platform as an advertising vehicle to reach this important demographic set.

The medium is ideal: even small games practically guarantee an exposure time of 40 to 50 hours per player (the average time it takes to complete a game), and gaming advertisers claim that the intensity of engagement during that period produces a brand recall rate three to four times that of TV. In this medium, blatancy is a positive virtue, since garish hoardings actually contribute to the realism of the game environment. A vending machine with a real Coca-Cola facing is more likely to add to the ambience of the game rather than to the annoyance of the player.

Developments such as Xbox Live and the growth of Internet gaming have added a further level to this type of marketing as ads can be updated regularly much as billboards are, and they can also be tailored to geographic location. It is common now for in-game billboards to feature the latest next release movies.

According to Massive CEO Davis, most gaming is engaged in during the former TV sweet spot time of 6pm to 12am. ‘Triple A' games, such as EA's Sims series offer hard-coded deep brand integration though the cost, lead times and unpredictable launch dates would terrify most brand strategists. Marketers are proactive in the more casual ‘advergaming' concept: these 15-minute casual games cost approximately S$10,000 to $15,000 on the cheap, and $60,00 to $130,000 at the premium end of the market.

But 80% of advertising revenue is currently accrued through dynamic online gaming.  Companies such as Massive broker between games publishers and advertisers, inserting billboards and posters directly into broadcast game environments. Local companies are emerging which can provide the necessarily intimate cooperative environments for advergaming to flourish in Singapore. BoomZap's Allan Simonsen points out that TV rules apply, and conflicts of interest have to be managed. "Some sort of line producer needs to sit between the developers and the agency -- someone who understands the brand and can mediate," said Simonsen.

 

Show me results

The reality is as MediaCorp's Eric Lynge admits, "agencies will be hard-pressed to evaluate product placement". He adds that "it would be a shame if it got commoditised and subject to endless rate negotiations".

However, Fremantle Media states that on most metrics, the brand recall rate to 30-second ad slots either side of a branded show are much higher than in shows where there is no integration. When Acuvue employed this technique in Singapore, it experienced a rise in the percentage of teenagers signing up for trials of its products.

Try telling Audi that results aren't measurable. Among the tangible results it attributes directly to Heist are 45 million PR impressions worldwide, two million unique visitors to audiusa.com, 10,000 dealer leads, 4,000 test drives and 500,000 story participants.

 

How do you do it?

First, there has to be a clear strategic intent. Marketers cannot afford to confuse brand awareness with brand strength. Following that, the nature of the message must fit the medium. Integrated marketing cannot deliver a detailed message; therefore marketers should carefully negotiate the periphery of the entertainment space they are buying into, which should include off-air rights on, for example, the Internet, stores and packaging.

The motivation for placing a brand in entertainment or setting it up as entertainment is, according to Universal McCann's Thurlow, "to engender a brand with consumers by placing it in an environment that helps to strengthen and give context to their brand".  Marketers need to be brutally honest with themselves: as one observer put it, "there is no point sticking tax accountants on a catwalk thinking it will make them look sexy." The essence of a brand must be a fundamental part of any story into which it is woven. In a perfect market, the entertainment would find the brand; the brand would not need to go looking for the entertainment.

How do you manage it?

Everyone interviewed for this piece stressed the necessity of early and sustained communication between the marketer and the creators or producers of the entertainment. Successful placement is a matter of delicate artistic skill, however, a succession of artistic judgement calls have to be made during the entire production trajectory from launch to formatting to editing. Unless producers can maintain a clear conception of brand objectives, the brand message will veer off course.

Subtlety can be a virtue when dabbling in branded entertainment, as Freemantle Media's Hindle points out. "Brands always say that they want a subtle ‘vibe', but at some point the brand will phone up and say they want to see the product name enamelled on the presenter's teeth," he said.

Since brands and their marketers need to justify their investment, there will inevitably be pressure for exposure and tangibility. According to one Singapore marketer, this dedication to mutual comprehension is "precisely what people here don't do".

 

The Future

MediaCorp's Lynge expects to see "more clients adding product placement at the expense of other media". California is the epicentre of entertainment production, and the lesson from there is that the steady flow of funds away from main advertising will inevitably impact entertainment.

But branded entertainment company Octtane's CEO Nick Marrett points out that the pressures forcing advertising into entertainment are also forcing advertisers to relearn old lessons. "When advertising was at its height, it held a mirror to society," he said. "The 70s were fun because we were hitting a nerve." Branded entertainment will get better because both producers and advertisers need it to, and both branding and entertaining will become the same thing.