The Better Mousetrap

BRANDS AS TRANSMEDIA PORTALS -

WHERE ENTERTAINMENT MEETS MARKETING

 (Picture: The DB10, on location in Rome.)

 

None of us should be satisfied with what we believe brands to be capable of.

Whatever we believe that capability, it can be more.

When Henry Jenkins first introduced Transmedia in his treatise, Convergence Culture (2006), he spoke of ‘media formats’ as ‘entrypoints into a story world’.

Jenkins talked not of brands but of ‘media’ as a story-telling tool.

On April 6^th, 2010, the Producers Guild of America announced the addition of ‘Transmedia Producer’ to the Producers Code of Credits. A big deal (that some termed ‘unprecedented’), it marked the first time in the guild’s 60-year history that a new credit had been added to the list.

At the time, no one was thinking of a Transmedia Producer as anything other than a person - and certainly no one was thinking about brands.

Five years on... and it is high-time we consider the greater potential for brands as ‘story-world entrypoints’ and transmedia producers.

Simply, we need to think differently - more ambitiously - about what can happen when you bring together the worlds of entertainment and marketing.

We need to shrug off near-ancient, limiting definitions like “product placement” and “commercial interruption”, because these definitions hinder new ways of approaching the creation and funding of entertainment.

We’ve come a long from Mike Myers in Wayne’s World, mugging ironically as he flips the lid on a delivery from Pizza Hut.

Rather than brands as jarring interlopers within a story, we must explore how they can facilitate the creation of entertainment, and even enhance the content being made.

When director James Cameron wanted to explore the Mariana Trench (and document the expedition as an independent movie), he turned to Rolex.

In Deepsea Challenge 3D (2014), Rolex effectively serves as co-producer in the film’s funding, with logo presence on the final theatrical poster, side by side with National Geographic and Disruptive LA.

Rolex subsequently released the Rolex Deepsea with D-Blue dial. Watch buffs could barely find words to express how radical an act this was for Rolex, suggesting the luxury brand paragon to be breaking and beginning a very different commercial and creative direction to its past.

When director Sam Mendes took to the Pinewood stage on December 4^th last year, announcing the 24^th Bond movie to be Spectre, he also lifted the veil on the new Aston Martin DB10. No one groaned. No one derided the moment as gratuitous product placement. Rather, flashbulbs popped and a delighted Andy Palmer, CEO of Aston Martin, emphasised:

“In the same year that we celebrate our 50-year relationship with 007, it seems doubly fitting that we unveil this wonderful new sports car created especially for James Bond.”

In reality, Aston Martin will use Spectre as the platform for what will not be a one-off sports car, but the design direction of their remodelled Vantage. In 2017, anticipate straplines to the effect, “Built for James Bond. And now for you.”

Land Rover/Jaguar are also keenly in on the act, Spectre becoming the latest instalment in their ongoing brand renaissance. The Range Rover Sport SVR and Defender Big Foot will grab precious screen time, while Jaguar’s web site proudly spoiler-alerts, “The C-X75 will feature in a spectacular car chase sequence through Rome alongside the Aston Martin DB10”.

To label Aston Martin and Jaguar as mere product placements in Spectre is to miss the bigger picture. These are partnerships: brand integrations that add further layers upon the narrative world.

This year’s Kingsman, from 20^th Century Fox, is a positive roll call of Cool Britannia brands. Think: Turnbull & Asser, Deakin & Francis, Drake, George Cleverley, Cutler & Gross, Smythson, and Bremont.

Under the banner of ‘Curated British Luxury’, men’s style destination MR PORTER invites us to dress like a Kingsman, offering a 60 piece collection.

Across their own digital and social graphs, 8 eight brands (9 when you include Mr Porter) all excitedly promote Kingman (and their “hand-picked collaboration” with the movie), so driving trailer views and product purchase.

Once upon a time, this might have been called merchandising - but it surely becomes something far more sophisticated when it loops in director Matthew Vaughn and costume designer Arianne Phillips at the pre-production stage.

Kingsman effectively presents retail brands as Transmedia entrypoints, fuelling movie anticipation, but more interestingly offering us the physical and mental props to get us in-character and wish-fulfilling.

It is clear that the entertainment business is learning the language of brands (and marketing) - and it will arguably do so faster than the agency world can learn how to make legitimate and singularly entertaining content.

Directors like James Cameron, Sam Mendes and Matthew Vaughn are showing us what the intersection of entertainment and marketing can look like: where brands can become buzz builders and movie co-producers, where they can become wish-fulfilment props and Transmedia portals.

I’m reminded of a scene from Robert Altman’s The Player (1992).

Griffin Mill: It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.

June: What elements?

Griffin Mill: Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.

June: What about reality?

Reality notwithstanding, to Griffin’s list I wonder, can we add ‘brands’?

SP.

Article as also appears in BrandRepublic, The Huffington Post and Business 2 Community.

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SPEND, IT’S WHAT YOU SAY: Movie-Marketing by Brilliant Example

 

Nightcrawler (2015)

 

The Jazz Singer. 1927. A major commercial hit for Warner Brothers and a motion picture watershed. The ‘talkies’ had arrived, ‘the silent movie’ bowed into the shadows, and into the 1930’s and 40’s stepped the likes of Citizen Kane, Walt Disney, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Hitchcock, Kapra and Casablanca. The ‘Golden Age’ of cinema.

Movie lovers could debate long into the night whether the 1970’s represented a second kind of ‘Golden Age’ - and debate could further rage as to whether we’re currently witnessing a third Golden Age of cinema.  

Consider this century. We’ve had Gravity and Avatar and the ever-expanding Marvel universe; Jack Sparrow and Disney finding their mojo with Frozen; Pixar’s Nemo, Buzz and Woody; Nolan’s Batman; Bourne and Bond rebooted; and The Potter, Hobbit and Hunger Games franchises.

Of the current 19 highest grossing films of all time (those being movies with a worldwide box office over the magic $1bn), 16 of those movies have been this millennium. Within the top 40 highest grossing movies of all time, only 4 movies date before 2000. Of course, not adjusting for inflation and the increasing cost of cinema tickets biases these numbers - but irrespective of adjustments, we are seeing the expenditure of much gold up there on our silver screens, and a global movie industry where the stakes and investments have never been higher.

 

JUST IMAGINE

Making a movie is seldom, if ever, cheap. Even those indie breakthroughs like Clerks and Blair Witch involved real people fronting their very real money. And at the other end of the spectrum, you have evermore annual tent poles rising on production budgets (un)comfortably north of $175m dollars. In support of that investment, you may well see some part (poster, trailer etc) of a global marketing campaign that cost a figure similar to production.

Imagine a $400m exposure? Just imagine you’ve cut all those cheques, while your brainpan itches with the recollection of how Disney took a $200m hit on John Carter - or you think farther back to movies like Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar, or Catwoman and Cutthroat Island? The wrong kind of pirates can fail, Halle Berry in a figure-hugging cat suit is no guarantee, and even casting Matthew McConaughey and having him take his shirt off still might not turn out as ‘awright’ as hoped. 2005's Sahara generated a relatively strong $122m box office… but cost over $241m to make. No one builds a career on those kinds of ratios.

The reality is that ‘too big to fail’ is no kind of logic, and that movies can tank for all kinds of reasons. Even good ones. Timing is one key variable.

Hard to believe, but It’s a Wonderful Life was a loss-maker for RKO on its release in 1946. It went up against Miracle on 34th Street and The Best Years of Our Lives. Easier to believe, World War 2 reduced Hollywood’s international release market by 60%. In consequence MGM's The Wizard of Oz and Walt Disney's Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi all underperformed.

Now for the good news. The cautionary tales are instructive, and while there’s no sure-fire way to snare lightening in a bottle, movie-marketing is being invited to experiment and express like never before.

 

BY BRILLIANT EXAMPLE

During a recent interview in The Hollywood Reporter, Tomas Jegeus (co-president of worldwide marketing and distribution at 20th Century Fox) acknowledged, “the increasing cost (of marketing a movie) is a massive challenge. Yet it's not how much you spend”, he added, “it’s the message. If we don't have the message right, nothing else matters”. Ultimately, Jegeus is talking to the fine art of knowing exactly what and what not to say.

In the case of Fox’s Gone Girl, Jegeus exampled, “We couldn't allude to the twist, so we couldn't tell half the story. We focused the whole campaign on Ben Affleck's character. Once the movie opened, we decided we could say more.”

This summer’s Gone Girl campaign was a treat. The proposition was perfectly judged and crafted, and of all the creative assets, the ‘Evidence bags’ posters (promoting the July 7 trailer) were further evidence of ‘transmedia marketing’ as it can be done.

Boil it right down, and movie-marketing is all about the WHAT, WHERE and WHEN.

WHAT to say (message and execution).

WHERE to say it (media).

And WHEN (timing).

But that’s not to say marketing a movie is easy. Far from it.

This summer’s Edge of Tomorrow (make that: Live Die Repeat) provided vivid example of how a studio initially got the message wrong, and later marketed it right.

The title, Edge of Tomorrow, did the movie no favours. It sounds bland. Translate it into other languages, and it barely makes sense (not that it makes that much sense in English). Then compare its final theatrical poster work with Tom Cruise’s previous dystopic/sci-fi/blockbuster, Oblivion.

Audiences could be forgiven for thinking it was the same movie. Which is all a shame, because both movies are very good.

‘Live. Die. Repeat.’ however is a great (central premise) tag line, which became ever-larger in creative executions as Warner Brothers’ campaign progressed. For the movie’s Home Ent digital and disc release, the tag line had usurped the original title, effectively becoming the far better title.

The happy lesson in this is that it’s not necessarily too late to tactically adjust.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is another example of how they ultimately - rather than initially - got the messaging right.

In 1968, 2001 polarised critics. Some gushed. Others just didn’t get it, and audiences initially inclined to the latter. On the basis of poor early box office, MGM were going to pull the movie. Exhibitors however reported to MGM that 2001 was gaining popularity with younger audiences, some of whom were eschewing popcorn in favour of “funny cigarettes” and LSD as they tripped their way through the movie’s psychedelic star gate sequence at the end of the second act.

In response, MGM marketing conceived a tactical poster months after the initial release: ‘2001: The ultimate trip’. You can see how the movie’s poster work evolved, the early illustrative work then inculcating the tactical creative, culminating in later theatrical posters that re-positioned the movie.

Whether 1968, 2001, or 2014, the delivery of What, Where and When requires invention and playfulness. How you tease. What you reveal. When you reveal it. What you hold back.

As a piece of compelling articulation, I’m a huge fan of Studio Canal’s tagline for The Imitation Game. “The true Enigma was the man who cracked the code.”

Churchill famously described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The description could as easily stand for what the best teaser marketing looks to achieve.

I absolutely loved the 50” teaser for this Autumn’s Nightcrawler. It’s a character portrait. A perfectly honed, performed and edited piece of content in its own right; the thinnest slice of a movie you can’t wait to feast on.

And while Nightcrawler’s later official trailer ably did what it had to do, I wondered whether it fell into the trap of so many final trailers, of showing and telling too much of the movie to come? Trailers are at their weakest when they become über-abridged versions of the final cut they’re promoting. They are at their best when we’re left still wanting.

Left ‘still wanting’ is certainly what the recent trailer for Eastwood’s 2015 American Sniper achieves. Like the Nightcrawler teaser, it’s a ‘standalone’ piece of content, a 1 min 40 scene that hurls you instantly into the moment, positing, “What would you do?”

This October, the final trailer for the independently produced Keanu Reeves actioner John Wick also played a blinder. Where 47 Ronin was a poorly marketed Last Samurai/Airbender mash-up that compelled few, John Wick was the very opposite: a Death Wish style/80’s throwback that plays it deadpan, while knowing exactly what it is and how it’s ironic.

The Wrap hailed the R-rated action thriller “a financial coup for Lionsgate's Summit Entertainment, taking $14.1 million in its opening weekend, double the projection of some analysts and more than $5 million better than the debut of Reeves’ 2013 mega-bomb 47 Ronin.”

John Wick was the right message. And it supported a smart theatrical window. When Fox’s Colin Firth spy thriller “Kingsman: The Secret Service” pushed its Oct 24 release to next February, Lionsgate pounced. “That opened up this weekend”, explained Lionsgate’s Richie Fay, “when the main competition would be Ouija, which skewed young and female — the opposite of the demo target for John Wick.”

Lionsgate should also consider adding actress Elizabeth Banks to their marketing payroll. Check out her (pro)activity on Instagram and Twitter in the build up to Mocking Jay Part 1. Bank’s considerable ability to independently promote the movie’s she stars in can only strengthen any decision to cast her. Patrick Stewart obliquely spoke to this very point in his address at this year’s Cannes Lions. Stewart and McKellan's use of Twitter to gain following and ultimately draw attention to their Broadway play was an exercise in celebrity (re)branding and broadening your consumer base.

A few well-judged tweets and it turns out Professor X and former USS Enterprise captain is one self-deprecatingly comic guy. Who knew? Very few, until Patrick Stewart showed us.

And no mention of this year’s star turns would be complete without mention of Marvel, and how one supervillain’s act of sabotage can be another superheroes’ viral ‘pheno-meme’.

The most popular movie trailer of all time was a trailer no one was meant to see. Marvel’s ‘leaked’ Age of Ultron teaser was up to 45m views after 6 days and provided the perfect drum roll ahead of the studio’s October 28^th Phase 3 announcement: a 9 movie batch over the next 5 years. There are certainly no strings on studio president Kevin Feige.

Of course, The Avengers is an established franchise with a strong and simple premise. But the point is that any premise is only strong and simple once you’ve made it that way. Genre-busting films like Blade Runner and Donnie Darko generated dismal initial box office because they got the better of the marketing minds that failed to effectively position and articulate them.

Back in 1964, it would have been just as easy to get the message wrong with Sergio Leone’s ground-breaking A Fistful of Dollars. Instead, United Artists struck gold. ‘The Man with No Name’ was a piece of pure marketing invention that gave mystique and cohesion to the spaghetti western franchise.

Fifty years later, and the 50 Paddington bear statues around London to promote the forthcoming movie is a similar act of marketing genius - the evocation of an iconic character that adds extra charm to the streets of London at Christmas time, as well as generating income for the NSPCC.

 

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITIES

In the movie industry, ‘entertainment’ is the thing of manufacture. There’s an investment in a tangible product, which everyone involved in the making hopes will sell. But hope is not enough and selling a movie is no fair-weather, plain-sailing task.

On the one hand, you have audience fragmentation, spiralling media costs, and an audience’s tech-assisted ability to edit and ignore. On the other (which is where it gets exciting), you have a digital playing field, transmedia story-telling, and the potential to grab pop culture by the throat. 

A third Golden Age of cinema may be hotly debated, but movie-marketing is being granted opportunities that are surely golden enough.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, Business 2 Community, Medium and LinkedIn.

WHILE IT MIGHT LOOK A LITTLE LIKE A DUCK

The ad model changed. An unintended consequence of Tim Berners-Lee sending an html missive, and the butterfly effect of digital revolution that followed.

 

Technology evolved ‘media’, and turned a portable telephone into a pocket-able, indispensable screen and ‘Reality Augmenter’. The list of consequences doesn’t end there, of course, but the long-short: old ways are being replaced by new necessities. Former ‘proven conventions’ have become broken records, so many ‘established paradigms’ sinking like heavy-weight dinosaurs in an unforgiving bath of tar.

 

Specifically, for the world of brands and agencies, this Star Date 2014 of ours is a bright and shiny frontier – bold new ways to do things, exciting places for brands to explore – but with more than a few frisky and fast-moving meteor fields to also contend.

 

Back in the analogue days of happy dinosaurs and no meteor fields, ad agency swagger could write the kind of cheques its ego could indeed cash. You had Maurice and Charles Saatchi, drunk on ‘Nothing is Impossible’ Thatcherism even try and buy a bank, the Midland Bank. Has balls-out hubris ever soared to greater heights than an ad agency wanting to offer banking loans to its clients, so that they might then be able to cover the costs of the fees they’re being charged?

 

In 1987, Saatchi’s attempts to buy Britain’s fourth largest bank (with assets to the tune of $77bn) failed dismally, but the money in making ads remained for a good 15 or so more years. Right up to the early noughties, the Saatchi employee car park still looked like a Park Lane dealership, chock full of high-end autos of Italian, German and British persuasion. Walk around that same car park today and it’s a ghostly affair, a kind of paradise (make that: prestige marque) lost - and I paint the picture because it’s so very telling of a very simple truth: you can’t make ads the same way anymore.

 

In our here and now, few brand-builders would dispute the new manifesto theory of advertising – where PUSH messaging and audience INTRUSION is replaced with PULL messages and the call to create content of inherent audience appeal. It’s sense of the wonderfully common kind. Sensible in a way we can all prefix with ‘infinitely’. It’s just, while very few brands (or their builders) would dispute the challenge to make ‘content’ that’s inherently appealing, fewer still have found their way into this new blue ocean.

 

It’s misguided to simply drop the word ‘advert’ from the marketing lexicon, replace it with ‘content’, and then progress in just the same way, producing something that’s as much a brand-centric message as it ever was. The undisputable, game-a-changing fact is this: all brands are now in the entertainment business.

 

And the step-up-to-mike response is not to apply old world thinking and create an open pipeline of ‘brand films’ that (a) don’t entertain, (b) come across like a social bore and (c) do nothing to earn or reward their audience’s attention. The role of a ‘brand film’ is not to simply bang on about the brand with all the same yesteryear car salesman hustle of a slightly longer TV ad.

 

The role of a brand film is to offer a ‘content gift’, something that charms or rewards, and in some small or more significant way, makes the viewer’s world that little bit better and more satisfying. Even if only for a moment. I still come back to the genius of Forsman & Bodenfors combining JCVD, Enya, and a desert sunset to illustrate “the precision and directional stability of Volvo Dynamic Steering.”

 

Brands are at their best when they are patrons and benefactors and investors in culture and creativity. They are at their best when their participation is self-evident but near silent. Brands become more appealing by saying less, and doing so with subtly and sincerity. Where brands are loud and brash, heavy-handed and charmless in their communications, and sincere in an estate agent kind of way, then they deserve all the derision and negative buzz they get, and all the views and likes they don’t.

 

I like what the Folio Society are up to. Their content gifts are arguably of niche appeal, but the Folio Society know their audience and reward accordingly, offering human narratives that complement the beautiful books they make and stories they sell. Three examples, niche as said, but still very nice: Ben Jones discussing his illustrations for A Clockwork Orange, The Art of Letterpress and The Art of Marbling.

 

Often curious how fine a line it can be between something working… and simply not working. The same tone and ‘human interest’ angle as used by the Folio Society is applied by M&S here in their Best of British SS14 Collection – and yet, as a viewer it leaves me cold and bored. I just don’t care. And I wager that very few ever would. It’s a sorry example of ticking off the needs of a client brief (we want to talk about provenance and quality and craftsmanship) with a painfully literal, brand-centric solution. In contrast, consider the content delight of M&S Food’s ‘Adventures in Imagination’. Because of course, really great ads are actually just great content. Though this thought is one Chivas appear to be wrestling with, ‘uploading and hoping’ with a diverse range of output that misses more than it hits.

 

First, a modest hit: Chivas’s ‘Story of Craftsmanship’ (honouring a partnership with British watchmaker Bremont) is a simple idea. Mostly split screens uniting lots of circles, it’s very nicely executed, though not a patch on what I suspect was its inspiration - the very brilliant ‘Symmetry’ short.

 

In contrast, Chivas’ content output struggles to know what it is when you then consider it’s ‘Win the right way’ platform, recruiting Hollywood high-brow-and-hot talent like Oscar Issac and Chiwetel Ejiofor to misapply stylised gloss to a CSR message. While start-ups able to generate social as well as commercial capital is a big-idea-into-ideal worthy of loud applause, I’m not buying into Chivas as its sincere champion. The Issac and Ejiofor executions feel like ads striving to be something else, when they’d have been better off just being better ads.

 

If Chivas had absolute commitment to the cause, taking ‘Win the right way’ truly to their DNA, they’d stop feeling a need to still make the kind of throw-back work (check out: Charles Dance as bar man and brand archetype) reminiscent of a time where the epitome of cool was regarded by some as Crockett and Tubbs cruising South Beach in a white Testarossa.

 

It’s not that I mean to pick on Chivas. It’s just their content output illustrates the blue oceans and meteor fields all brands presently face. Brands have permission like never before, to make ‘content’ that is sincere and that audiences have always naturally craved. While on the downside, ‘bad advertising’ is arguably more found out than it ever was, its underlying urge to sell laid wholly bare.

 

The entertainment business is fundamentally about entertaining, about making money by being very good at entertaining, at rewarding and satisfying audiences. The lesson for brands is that pseudo imitation of the bona fide entertainment industry can lead to content-sins worthy of a Dr Frankenstein. It’s all well and good casting Hollywood talent, but making something that looks a little like a duck and walks a little like a duck is no guarantee of a winning quack or waddle. And while a masquerading platypus with a knack for impersonation might be rather entertaining, anything less literal and similarly false is likely to falter.

SP.

Article as also appears on BrandRepublic, The Huffington Post, Medium and Business 2 Community.

Back Through the Looking Glass: The Lessons of Gravity

 

 

“Lowry … stood across the road from his subjects and observed. Often enough there are a number of individuals in a crowd peering back at him. They invite us momentarily into their world, like characters on a stage sometimes do, breaking the fourth-wall illusion.”

‘Sir Ian McKellen: My lifelong passion for LS Lowry’ (The Telegraph, 21 April 2011)

 

Breaking the fourth wall is always a bold decision. To explicitly acknowledge the audience is to deliberately break the illusion, an act as liable to pull an audience out of the moment as draw them conspiratorially in.

It worked for Alfie, it worked for Ferris Bueller, and considering Sir Ian McKellen’s remarks, it worked rather well for Northern artist LS Lowry.

Of course, art and movies and story-telling at their best have always used their magic to invite audiences into their world.

When Alice stepped through the looking glass, she broke through the fourth wall, crossed the divide and entered a land different to her own. This is why we love books and movies and plays. Because we are transported. We are exposed to a place other than our own. We become someone other than who we are, potentially are provoked into experiencing a set of feelings that are far from commonplace. And as you read this (yes, that was me breaking the fourth wall) you may fairly think, “this is all true, but nothing new.”

Where novelty always returns to the fray is when technological progress marries with creative vision, allowing story-tellers to keep challenging “the imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience.” (Wikpedia)

Consider Irmin Roberts’ reverse (dolly) zoom in Vertigo (1958) and Spielberg’s genius-stealing of it for Jaws (1975), in both cases evoking for audiences that “falling-away-from-oneself feeling”.

Consider the way Steadicam inventor Garret Brown tracked Danny’s Big Wheel tricycle tours through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick acknowledged the invaluable contribution Brown made to The Shining, using the Steadicam “as it was intended to be used – as a tool which can help get the lens where it’s wanted in space and time without the classic limitations”.

Consider the genius of Welles, Altman and De Palma and where they respectively placed their lenses to create the opening tracking shots for Touch of Evil (3 mins 20), The Player (8 mins 5) and Bonfire of the Vanities (4 mins 50).

Movies have always provided escapism, for audiences the suspension of everyday proceedings, where we suddenly stop disbelieving, forget who we are, and begin to vicariously experience something else.

In 1978, the marketing of Richard Donner’s Superman promised, “You’ll believe a man can fly”. In 2013, Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel treated us to Superman-cam, of not just watching a 21st C-GI Superman, but being part of scenes as if we could fly as him.

As ‘The Audience’ we have always inclined to step (like Alice) through the fourth wall and project ourselves into the scene – and the latest film-making technologies are making that natural inclination a more immersive, deeply felt experience. The success of Gravity, and particularly the success of the Gravity trailers, provide perfect illustration.

Gravity’s official trailer is close to 11m views on YouTube. It was the highest viewed trailer of all the movies nominated for an Oscar in 2013. Warner Bros produced a total of 41 official videos for the film, generating over 26m views. In consequence they have also re-written the rules for the role of promotional content in a movie’s marketing mix – because the trailers weren’t just serving to tease. They weren’t merely keyhole views of the main event – but visual spectacles in their own right. The official trailer is a 2 min 20 sensation of the very proposition that would have got Gravity the green light in the first place. Just imagine being lost in space, not in the “Danger Will Robinson” sense, but in the trapped in a vacuum, the ultimate bigness of nothing creating the most absolute sense of claustrophobia and despair? You get that experience from the trailer.

The trailer has the potential to become an event on its own merit, to be content that works standalone in its ability to mesmerise and hypnotise.

In the ‘All About Me’ age of social media documentation, first person chronicling and Go Pro capturing, Gravity’s trailer is the perfect content fix. Tellingly, the theatrical poster for Gravity also eschewed famous face exhibiting conventions. Like the image of Jaws ascending on an unsuspecting swimmer, Gravity’s poster shows its own ‘ultimate oh-no moment’, the image of a space man, safety line suddenly broken.

Gravity further evidences that it is a fascinating time for the marketing of movies, and indeed, for movie-making.

Second-generation 3-D is more effectively immersing audiences within ‘The Moment’. 3-D is at last evolving from the gimmickry of shooting arrows at us. With Avatar, Cameron created a very green and vividly rendered world, which started the 3-D ball rolling once again. Certain scenes in Prometheus were better for being seen with depth perception, the technology evoking a viewing experience that paralleled that felt by the characters. And then Alfonso Cuarón came along and changed the game again, making a movie that felt like you were watching from inside a gyroscope.

Whether watching Gravity in 2D or 3D, the experience is captivating, dizzying, disorienting. The audience is afforded 91 minutes of what it must feel like to attend space camp, and then have disaster strike. (Cuarón described his opening tracking shot as “a pain in the ass” – but then, maybe all great art is?)

I suspect Gravity might just be the dawning sun of a new genre in movie making: the ‘super-immersive’ movie concept. It will influence the movies that get produced and how they are later marketed.

While there has always been a connecting thread, a kind of umbilical cord between screen and audience, in where the lens is so remarkably placed, Gravity newly considers ‘the viewing sensation’. Cuarón is re-acknowledging that all the world really is a stage, upon which we have concurrent roles, where we serve as both audience and look to fashion ourselves as protagonist.

The Best Director oscar is gloriously deserving for a movie (and movie concept) that sucks us through the fourth wall and into the illusion of story and space. While we know that we’ll make it out of the movie theatre, our empathy with Sandra Bullock is such that there are moments when we feel it could be touch and go.

Watching Gravity isn’t life threatening, but to steal a line from Robert Redford at the end of The Sting, a tale of illusion and deception, “it sure is close”.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, The Wall and Business 2 Community.

THE NEW GAME

 

 

Daniel Schorr (on TV): There's a tiny camera looking at you right now.
Nicholas van Orton: That's impossible.
Daniel Schorr: You're right, impossible. You're having a conversation with your television.

The Game (1997)

 

In David Fincher's 'The Game', Michael Douglas' over-achieving but bored-with-life banker, Nicholas van Orton, is either the centre of an insanely elaborate role play fantasy or he's the mark in an equally byzantine con designed to liberate him of his fortune and potentially his life. While we're left guessing right to the end, what's clear is that Nicholas can't even sit down and watch TV without it talking back at him.

 

Beyond being a 129 minute slice of fine entertainment, I think the campaign architects among us can learn something from 'The Game' - something about how to design better advertising, where campaigns are more akin to episodic, multi-layered and sensory 'real life' experiences that place the consumer in circumstances not so dissimilar to those of Mr Nicholas van Orton.

 

But let me back up a bit and start with what we first understood by the term 'consumer-centric'. The late 90s new breed Comms Planners cried, "Put the Consumer first!". It was a measured jab in the side of account planning, as born of the Stephen King/JWT School.

 

Account planning is too brand-centric declared the comms planners, meaning the brand shows too much ego and the manifestation is too likely a self-flattering TV ad, beamed intrusively into everyone's sitting rooms during those regulated bursts of interruption in between the actual TV shows we all chose and tuned in to watch.

 

This, you can appreciate, was all back in our analogue past when media channels were few, little more than delivery mechanisms - figurative postmen delivering the messages of the mad men - and when (in fairness) 'As seen on TV' still carried real cachet and clout.

 

But comms planning (circa. 1998) gave credence to the notion that everything communicates, every brand act, gesture and touch point. There may be a media channel hierarchy, but everything communicates a message to the consumer, from a bumper sticker to a TV ad break.

 

But why the potted ad-land history lesson of which so many of us are au fait? To steal a line from American author Bret Easton Ellis, because ours "is the game that turns as you play".

 

All that shake-up-the-system talk of becoming more consumer-centric now feels very consumer-centric 1.0. While the notion of an end game campaign that was channel agnostic and built on audience insight still makes cast-iron sense, it drops to its knees like a fallen warrior when the outcome remains a set of creative assets exhibited across a range of static media channels - the message still pushed and media's only charge, that of reaching eyeballs.

 

And yet perhaps this was the fated inevitability of a noble sentiment in an analogue world, where people were talking consumer-centric before the world became a digital one?

 

Now we're after, we're anno digital, meaning consumer-centric 2.0 (binary-assisted, with CES-style upgrades) is a very different box of delights with a very different set of implications.

 

Consider how technology has changed the nature of media; how it's made and will continue to make media consumer-centric and evermore social. Think: social TV (EPG meets Facebook), and social outdoor (digital posters as Twitter feeds).

 

At a $4 billion valuation, Spotify has shown music's worth in our digital age. I'd argue Spotify's success-formula is born of putting its listeners in the centre of its digital system, in allowing the creating and sharing of playlists.

 

Is Spotify a tech? Or a kind of app? A product or a piece of media? A brand, or a consumer-centric blend of all the above? From Nike+ to cycling apps like Strava, technology is allowing us to 'game-ify' our lives. Our pavements, cycle lanes and roads are being augmented, being re-imagined as bio and chrono-metric performance route maps that allow us to turn every A-to-B into a kind of personal hero's journey.

 

Media continues to probe the fuzzy borders between delivering content and encouraging it. Next generation press formats are emerging where magazines become a live-feed blend of editorial comment and reader response. Where magazines once claimed to know their audience and write for them, tomorrow's magazines will see their readers contributing increasingly more than just a letter to a reader's page. Culture and media have never been more symbiotic and co-authored.

 

Technology is reshaping culture. We've not only all become technophiles, but we've all become tech-empowered. In an age where we've all now become so accustomed to having a voice, so accustomed to liking and tweeting and blogging and sharing, brand-centric campaigns are being humbled... but brand builders can slipstream the examples and fast apply the proof of concept.

 

Consumer-centric 2.0 is all about the consumer being the very human and beating heart of a brand campaign, where we each feel like we're being given centre stage, role and deed.

 

Because who wants to feel inert, a mere aggregate-adding member of the couch-bound majority? Who wants to be viewed as passively receiving the contents of a flickering screen, that chewing gum for the eyes that asks little of the mind?

 

Alternatively, who wants to feel like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts or Michael Douglas? Who wants to be the hero or heroine of the piece, in the middle of it all, senses alive? It's flattering to feel like the main attraction, being the one getting to roll the dice, with every suspicion that the entire game might be designed just for us.

 

Where the TV ad was once a brand's main event, it's now more akin to a movie trailer - the buzz-bomb prior to the feature-length campaign. And today's main campaign event - the big feature-length presentation - is not all about consumers watching the brand equivalent of Tom Cruise or Michael Douglas.

 

In our binary world, the TV ad sets the tone and possible theme, and then the campaign puts the audience front and centre. It casts the consumer as the hero and main protagonist. The consumer is no longer just the human insight trigger-pull to the subsequent brand campaigns we create.

 

21st century ad campaigns can crash first-person story-telling into digital media. A brand becomes the calling card that knocks at our door - a call to arms and action.

 

By extension of putting consumers in control, the new consideration should become how campaigns can put them in character. Beyond us asking, "What is the role for the brand?", we need to establish, "What is the heroic role we are giving the consumer?" A hero-in-waiting needs to be called upon to do more than just watch telly.

 

Unlike Nicholas van Orton, we can't yet have a conversation with our TV sets, but in building brands, we are playing a very new game.

SP.

Article as also appears in The Huffington Post, Business 2 Consumer, The Wall and MediaTel Newsline.

NOW DO WEAR TO THE LEFT, 007

THE CASE FOR KISS KISS BANG BANG

 

 

 

Like an Antony Gormley figure, there is something magnificent about the solitary human form; the James Dean loner; the Jack Bauer or Nicholas Brody lone agent. Stealthy types, moving in the shadows, on the outside – it reads cool off the page and walks cool across our screens. Fleming’s Bond, Ludlum’s Bourne: tough, icy, enigmatic, alone.

Yet most typically during the course of our everyday’s, few of us do “work alone”, independent and at a remove from others. In reality more the opposite is the case.

We get things done by joining forces and working together, which is why the pragmatic innovator in me would like to take this moment to praise the collaborative spirit, because Milton was on the nose. No man really is an island. It’s invariably partnerships and pairings that can make us ‘more’. By way of evidence, I’ll start with a maybe-not-so-lone 007 in the Caribbean.

 

THE CUT OF BOND’S JIB

When Daniel Craig channelled Ursula Andress and rose from the Bahamian blue in Casino Royale, the pupil dilations were of sufficient number for the majority to concur with what producer Barbara Broccoli had always known. Craig was an inspired piece of casting. It didn’t hurt that he was also a damn-fine actor. The innovation equation was clear: Broccoli + Craig = Bond Rebooted.

When Craig later emerged from a roof-top pool in the Shanghai sequence of Skyfall, the major coup for clothing brand Orlebar Brown was that 007 was wearing a pair of their swim shorts.

I discovered Orlebar Brown in 2009 when they featured in Monocle magazine. Their limited edition ‘Monocle Bulldog’ shorts were a partnership with editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé, one of a series of limited edition pairings from O+B. A Bill Amberg retro capsule of shorts, beach towel and tote bag was another. “No, Simon. It’s possible to over-accessorize”, was my wife’s very clear instruction at the time.

While quite possibly true, I admire the way Orlebar Brown has scaled their brand and ramped their cachet through associations and partnerships. Their ‘premium brand’ accent has been with the help of some shrewdly selected style Sherpa’s.

I’m even tempted to argue that O+B are taking their lead from the Bond movie formula, because while you need to find the right guy for the tux (or swim shorts), this one ingredient alone does not ensure a 50 year franchise.

Consider the narrative Bondian ingredients: girls, gadgets, exotic locations, fast cars, megalomaniac adversaries. Beauty, danger, sex, death; in the singular, they’re all alluring elements, but paired together they become intoxicating. 

The Bond legacy is really just one long line of inspired commercial and creative pairings, the latest expression being Broccoli and half-brother Michael G. Wilson as co-producing double act.

Go wider and consider how any movie gets made. The entire movie industry is built on co-production funding. Creating a pot of cash is an exercise is forecasting likely back-end profit, with an up-front appeal to hearts and minds, inviting movie studio and private investor alike to “buy into the vision”. No one can make a movie, not a good one, singlehandedly.

Of course, I use Bond and the movie-making machine to evidence a broader point. Though to further build a line of exhibits, I may free-associate through a Fleming-esque world of fast cars and fine watches.

 

FAST CARS & FINE WATCHES

 

Bond: Where’s my Bentley?

Q: Oh, it’s had its day, I’m afraid.

Bond: But it never let me down.

Q: M’s orders, 007. You’ll be using this Aston Martin DB5… with modifications.”

Goldfinger (1964)

 

Perhaps 007’s gruff was false front. He would surely have read Fleming’s ‘Goldfinger’ in advance, would have known that his written-word self had been placed behind the wheel of a motor car branding a DB. But had Fleming and then Q not been so insistent, would the Aston Martin DB5 be quite so iconic?

 

EXHIBIT A: A thing of beauty regardless, but the DB5’s Bondian past contributes to its current £350k price tag.

Aston Martin aficionados might however incline to suggest it wasn’t partnering with Bond, but with Brown that made all the difference.

 

“The man who truly put Aston Martin on the map was David Brown, who in 1947 answered a classified advertisement in The Times seeking an owner for “a high-class motor business”. Brown acquired Aston Martin for £20,500.”

Esquire, The Big Black Book, Autumn/Winter 2013

 

EXHIBIT B: Aston Martin + David Brown = Automotive History.

 

Though what would Brown make of the announcement this July that future Aston Martin’s will be powered by Mercedes AMG engines? In this arrangement, Mercedes (more accurately Daimler) will take a 5% stake in Aston Martin, a business that is now co-owned by two Kuwaiti companies and one Italian private equity firm.

Very soon, any Aston with or without a DB will also be kitted out with German engineered electrics and command systems (simply meaning the GPS will accurately plot A to B, and you’ll be able to get there even quicker).

While a German engine in an Aston Martin might feel instinctively wrong, I suspect David Brown (and Q) would have approved. Anyone who’s driven anything propelled by an AMG engine knows Aston Martin’s will be better for it. And faster. And you only have to check to the cyber chatter to see: no one’s complaining.

 

EXHIBIT C: Aston Martin + AMG = Faster & Better.

 

An Anglo-German auto pairing is arguably no different to having a Swiss movement in an Italian watch.

 

EXHIBIT D: Officine Panerai began making over-sized watches in 1860, but only in the last few years have they started making their own movements. Prior, Panerai had always used a Rolex movement.

 

Circling back to Bond’s Bentley that never let him down. Sadly, there was a point when Bentley had become a let-down. Then, in 2003, came the Bentley Continental GT. It revived the aging Bentley marque and reversed the company’s fortunes. Behind its release was a simple fact: Bentley was a company under new ownership.

The Continental GT was a Bentley made by VW (who’d wholly bought the company in 1998), targeted not at former Bentley drivers (an atrophying breed), but at well-heeled 40-something motoring enthusiasts (and premier league footballers).

Check out Breitlingforbentley.com for another shrewd pairing. “British chic, Swiss excellence: Breitling for Bentley combines the best of both worlds” declares the homepage, accompanied by spokesperson David Beckham, kitted out in a version of Sean Connery’s Goldfinger wardrobe.

 

EXHIBIT E: (Bentley + VW + Breitling) x (Brand Beckham) = More Bondian?

 

Where Brietling bought Beckham, Omega bought Bond, writing a cheque of sufficient sway to bump Rolex from 007’s wrist. For me, the Moon is a far richer association for Omega. Their Speedmaster still (quite fairly enough) dines out on being the first watch to step, via Buzz Aldrin, on to the surface of the Moon.

 

EXHIBIT F:

“Just after landing on the Moon, the Lunar Module’s on-board electronic timer broke down. Neil Armstrong left his Speedmaster aboard as a reliable backup. As a result, the first watch worn on the Moon was on Aldrin’s wrist.”

Source: www.omegawatches.com

 

LISTEN TO WILL.I.AM

Thelma and Tom would just be names, but partner them with Louise and Jerry, and they assume famous meanings and vivid narratives. Starsky, Hansel, Fred, Morecambe - add Hutch, Gretal, Ginger and Wise and you have a fun-sounding law or ad agency, plus some serious bellbottoms and dance steps.

Staying on the theme of outrageous wardrobes and rocking backing tracks, let’s consider the music world. Elton John is Elton John… because of writer Bernie Taupin, and Will.I.Am is Will.I.Am… because of his truly open-minded approach to music-making.

 

“In collaborations and with the Black Eyed Peas, Will.I.Am has a total of 34 Top 40 entries on the UK Singles Chart since 1998, and has sold 9.4 million singles in the UK.”

Source: Wikipedia

 

EXHIBIT G: I really enjoy how Will.I.Am has built his brand through “featuring”. His creative partnerships often seem incongruous, but they create sounds that feel progressive and compel:  

• Flo Rida, featuring Wil.I.Am, gave us “In the Ayer”: a US double platinum and the Summer anthem of 2008. Everyone now: “Oh hot damn, this is my jam”.
• Post “Girls Aloud”, Cheryl Cole gave Wil.I.Am full creative control on what became her triple platinum debut, “3 Words”. He remains Cole’s co-manager.
• “O.M.G.” was written, produced and features Wil.I.Am, but lives on R&B artist Usher’s sixth studio album, Raymond vs. Raymond. It went double-platinum.
• And then there’s also Will.I.Am’s collaborations with Nicki Minaj, JayLo, Jagger, Justin Bieber, Britney, and Bazz Luhrmann, begging the question, does the guy ever sleep?

 

Collaborations can make beautiful music - which, for want of discursive symmetry, returns me to Bond. The Bond Song has always been fundamental to the formula and has always been a hit or miss matter of partnerships. McCartney and Live & Let Die. Duran Duran and View to a Kill. Successes.

General consensus would have it that Jake Black and Alicia Keys crooned a recent dud (‘Another Way to Die’), but no question inviting Adele to the Skyfall party was a centre-of-heart winner.

Some codes can be enigmatic. Certain formulas can seem closer to alchemy. I don’t look upon The Collaboration Code, The Featuring Formula, as a thing of mystery. It’s about being open-minded and giving.

Co-creation doesn’t have to be dilutive. One plus one can equal three, the procreation equation, the genesis of something new. No one should get into bed with just anyone, but everyone should be on the lookout for the right cuddle buddy.

I once had a boss who believed the only good ideas were his. It also didn’t matter whether the idea had started as someone else’s. Ended up his. My only point is that it wasn’t the most generous or inclusive kind of perspective. ‘Not invented by Me’ dead-ends collaborative creativity. I rather prefer Will.I.Am’s way of doing things. I believe we can learn much from a world of Fleming and 007, from our luxury brands and music’s megastars.

Fleming once described his novels as "pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety".  

Writing this while listening to Will.I.Am’s latest ‘Bang Bang’, there’s 20’s Charelston, some Cher, a touch of Louis Armstrong, extra vocals from both Shelby Spalione and Nicole Scherzinger, all kinds of talent in the mash. It’s an exercise in creative polygamy.

“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”?

Join forces, snuggle up, and who knows what might happen? Something brilliant? Something explosive? Whether you preference a Walther or a Berretta, it feels like a formula that’s worth a shot.

SP.

Article as also appears in Business 2 Community.

TRASHED IN PARADISE

WHY WE ALL NEED TO START LISTENING TO JEREMY IRONS

“I wanted to make a documentary about something that needed to be talked about. I spend much of my energies telling fictitious stories. This is a very true story. An important one.”

Jeremy Irons, interviewed at IFFP

 

When someone like Jeremy Irons speaks, you figure people will listen. Because he’s Jeremy goddamn Irons, top tier A-lister, Best Actor Oscar winner. As in Dead Ringers, The Lion King, Die Hard 3 Jeremy Irons, who can even make a papal wardrobe (The Borgias) look passable.

So you bet, if I was making a movie (or in this case a documentary), then Jeremy Irons would be up there as my first choice go-to, like he’d be for most everybody, like he was for Candida Brady.

Candida Brady is the director of last year’s eco documentary, Trashed. Brady describes herself as a mother worried “about the effect our toxic legacy is having on our children”, where researching for the project compelled her to make Trashed, “come what may.”

Which leads me to one very simple question.

Trashed, starring Jeremy Irons; this important true story that had to be made come what may; have you heard of it and seen it?

Because I hadn’t. At least, I hadn’t until recently visiting a film festival (the IFFP) on the Greek island of Patmos. And it was after the screening that I got to interview Jeremy Irons and admit that his new movie had been new news to me. Yes, a little awkward. But also telling. And rallying. So let me save you the same admission, tell you about Trashed, and compel you to see it, too.

 

A PARADISE CALLED PATMOS; A MOVIE CALLED TRASHED

Trashed screened on the third day of third annual film festival on Patmos. It was a day where a troop of SPF 50’d children had been combing the beaches for discarded water bottles and lollipop sticks, before then turning them into pieces of artwork that went under (the right kind of) hammer in the festival’s charity auction that evening.

The setting of Patmos is rather perfect for screening an eco docu like Trashed, because Patmos is an island paradise, an Aegean gem, where crystal clear waters are cut by diagonal blades of sunlight that still shimmer 20 metres down. The glancing eye of a visitor might miss the island’s landfill challenge or ongoing beach and water clear up, but it’s there and happening.

And it’s very likely because you’re so accosted by nature’s beauty, on such a beautiful island, that you feel more aware of the care we should be taking with our planet, and how we might be quite seriously trashing it.

 

Skala, from above (Patmos island)

Of course, this open-your-eyes island life vantage is rarely afforded. Too often, we’re all too busy marching through our every-days with our heads down and our thoughts everywhere else. Which is where Jeremy Irons, Candida Brady and Trashed come in.

Irons is plainly aware of how profile and celebrity can force people to slow their march, to stop, stare, and be drawn closer to the flame.

“I feel it’s incumbent on people who have a profile to raise the profile of these issues. We have no agenda. We don’t have to answer to shareholders. We artists just get to look at the world around us, free of bias, so we get to see it pretty clearly.”

And what is clear is this: Trashed is a documentary that needs to be seen, that needs to enter the mainstream. Because we’re (still) trashing the planet. We’ve heard this enough to stop thinking about the implications, to start humming to what’s become white noise - but Trashed rearticulates the message, volunteering a not just inconvenient but downright harrowing set of truths.

Our life of making and chucking away plastic anything should come with a multi-generational cancer-causing health warning. Really, truly, it should. This is why Candida felt compelled to make this movie. This is why Jeremy Irons is a UN Goodwill Ambassador (of the Food and Agriculture Organization) and served as Executive Producer on Trashed. It’s also why Irons didn’t just lend name and voice and simply commit a couple of studio days on voiceover duties.

“I wanted to be the voice of the audience, to really be there, in it, the one asking the questions the audience would like to ask.”

Consequently, Irons very deliberately puts himself in the frame, in the narrative cross hairs. He is not just our guide but our eye witness, travelling from Lebanon to San Francisco, via the UK, Iceland and Vietnam. The globe-trotting is the opposite of glossy. It demonstrates the scale of the issue and how heart-felt the matter is for Irons, Brady, and all involved. This kind of sincerity makes for what the critics like to call “brave” documentary-making.

Certainly, Trashed doesn’t hold back on the heavy punches. There are shock tactics. When Irons is feeling it, you feel it too. And that’s maybe as it should be, because to leave a lasting impression sometimes requires candour and the suspension of sugar-coating and niceties.

Trashed becomes a movie to face up to.

 

THE TRUTH IS… IT AIN’T EASY SELLING GREEN

“Money is to be made in recycling. We have too many incinerators in England and Europe - what are laughingly called waste-to-energy incinerators”, says Irons. “They are in fact waste-to-waste. But policies and new methods of recycling can be put in place. Some of this is very simple to do.”

We chuck away, and it becomes landfill, hidden away, out of sight and mind. Or we try and incinerate what we chuck, and it becomes ash, but then what do you do with the ash, which, as Irons emphasises, is simply a different kind of waste. What happens to all the smoke that hopefully just blows away? A big sky full of air. A big sea full of water. Surely our waste would dilute?

Wrong.

The long-short is the opposite. Nature doesn’t dilute pollution, but re-concentrates it.

Every plastic bag we bury or burn goes back into the environment, and back into the food chain, which goes back into our mouths. Whatever goes into the air and soil and sea goes back into us. The fish, the livestock, their diets becoming our diets, becoming carcinogenic metals (the most bad-ass kind of nasties called dioxins) that we can’t excrete and that accumulate in increments, rather like a time bomb ticking down.

So recycle or die becomes the message of Trashed, because we’re killing ourselves by not. And yet…

It ain’t easy selling green. Green still creates an audible groan. Eco messages still fall on too many deaf ears. Until the sky falls or the seas rise enough to start building Arks and grabbing our snorkels, until we have palpable and all-too-late evidence, then the great danger is that we’ll mostly continue to think and feel and behave in all ways short-termist. By consequence, governments don’t push the green agenda because they don’t have to, because green issues don’t sway voters or win elections.

Green still gets dismissed with a wafting hand, the preoccupations of tree huggers and tofu munchers.

Occasionally green cut-through. An Inconvenient Truth created global alarm about global warming, but that movie message has thinned since its 2006 moment at the podium. The truth is, with our goldfish memories and inclination to swerve inconvenience; we need to be frequently reminded of how we’re trashing the planet. It’s only through reminder and prompting that we’re likely to stop trashing and start fixing.

Trashed becomes a fresh reminder and aid memoir: we cannot keep treating our world the way we’ve been treating it. And this fresh reminder, where and when it is seen, is affecting change. Irons points out,

“Those who see Trashed, some are decision-makers, many can be influencers. Trashed screened in New York, where Mayor Bloomberg subsequently made a statement that from now on, all plastics of whatever type, would be recycled.”

Even Jeremy Irons can only open so many doors, hearts and minds to a set of ideas that needs to become a better way of life. The trick is: how do you get everyone to see it?

Until attending the Patmos film festival, I awkwardly admit, I hadn’t. “Is Trashed creating the reaction you’d hoped?”, I ask. “Is it yet being talked about the way you’d hoped?” Irons is very open in response.

“It’s always difficult to know.”

 

THE DISCOVERABILITY BOOGEYMAN

Go to IMDB and Trashed gets an 8.6 out of 10, having so far generated… one ‘user review’. It also got 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. The scores are great… but you don’t have to search deep in cyberspace to establish that Trashed hasn’t yet gone supernova.

Trashed’s one user review on IMDB is from a guy who watched it at the Cork Film Festival last Autumn, who calls it “well intentioned” but who felt at times “like standing up and going ‘OK I GET IT!! LET'S MOVE ON!!’"

It’s says everything about our Ctrl-Alt-Comment times, when a 0.20 second performing Google search for “Trashed” takes you one click away from first-stop site IMDB - where the first batch of words you read includes a guy who saw it in Cork and felt frustrated by how Trashed reinforces its message.

Stay on IMDB and you’ll discover Guggenheim and Gore’s 2006 global warming warning, An Inconvenient Truth, has 497 user reviews. It has of course had 7 years to generate those reviews, but there’s no question that at its time of release

An Inconvenient Truth gained the kind of mainstream attention that got it shown in company lunch breaks and school classrooms. And even 497 user reviews is modest the moment you step outside the docu genre.

Blockbusters like Avengers Assemble have nearly 1500 user reviews on IMDB. We live in a digital age, the ‘Age of the Share’, where a mercurially chosen few find fame and following, and where most “content” fizzles into nothing. “Discoverability” is the challenge, in this vast and misty digital sea of so much.

The movie, music and publishing industries are all kept sleepless and nocturnal by the “dicoverability” boogeyman. Because he can neither be understood nor caged. Because “The Discovered” is not necessarily based on criteria like quality or importance. The absurdly trivial catches on.

Sneezing panda’s, Clit Lit and South Korean pop videos become global idea viruses and pop cultural tent poles. ‘PSY – GANGNAM STYLE’ is closing in on 2 billion views on YouTube and nearly 8 million ‘Likes’. Considerably more effort than clicking a ‘thumbs up’ icon, over 26,000 people have felt sufficiently compelled to write a Customer review on amazon.com for Fifty Shades of Grey. Irons is entirely right when he says,

“There is a clear feeling from a growing number of people that the time has come for us all to start to try and change our ways, and to endeavour to live a more careful life."

Yet society still inclines to mobilize en masse and devote its time to the pop culturally trivial and inconsequential. The challenge with a movie like Trashed is how you get a subject of significance to not just ripple but shockwave the Zeitgeist, to get as many people to see it as have read Fifty Shades or done the Gangnam pony dance. This is where you and I come in.

To repeat Irons, “The time has come.”

 

TIME TO SUIT UP

Don’t we all want to leave this place better than we found it; the planet, an heirloom past on in reasonable shape?

A toxic legacy is no kind of legacy.

While we’re here, don’t we want to achieve something of worth, make the odd contribution that’s real, tangible, even noble? Sure, we might not be able to be noble every day.

We may have bills to pay that urge us to pursue things more mundanely every-day, but surely on some days, we can aspire to making a lasting difference. And surely every day, we can recycle, which will all add up to making a genuine difference too.

A recycling culture isn’t as difficult or as overwhelming as it might still feel. Sure, big business with deep pockets and political connections will resist society’s efforts to change. But politics and big business still has to move with the social tide.

We need to create new, stronger currents.

We’re not yet indignant enough. We haven’t yet demonized apathy toward recycling, or vilified the daily practices that don’t support it.

Recycling needs to be made simpler for people, the way smoking was suddenly made hard. “You can’t smoke in here. Get outside in the cold if you want to smoke. Oh, it’s raining? Good.”

Smoking has been socially marginalised, the act now seen as foolish, reckless, selfish, stupid. Even with a piece of dream-casting like Irons, there’s still no absolute guarantee that any movie and message is going to be seen and heard. A green message, about conservation, recycling and the consequences of not recycling: this stuff doesn’t tend to fan the flames of fanboy frenzy, get the whispering classes yabbering, or trend in Cyberspace like a new Bond or Batman movie.

Assemble the Avengers and everyone will get giddy and the Box Office tills will trill to a note in the billion dollars register. But make a documentary about trash, which makes us feel not like superheroes but planet-trashing parasites… well, it’s a tougher selling flavour of Kool Aid.

Only, Trashed is a Kool Aid we need to drink and a message we must heed. It’s action out of awareness time. Avenger-like, we need to assemble, to suit up, as individuals, and as a society. We need to watch movies like Trashed, start being smarter and behaving better - in order to save this planet and give us any shot of there being a real-life sequel. We need to listen to Jeremy Irons:

“We have to build up general public consensus. We have to change our ways. We have to build a movement about an unacceptable state of affairs.”

Before the Patmos screening, Trashed had passed me by. Only, it doesn’t have to have passed any of us by, because it only came out late last year and it isn’t even yet out on rental. So consider this a Bat sign in the night sky. Let’s get Trashed trending. Let’s ensure Jeremy Irons and Candida Brady are heard and that their movie is seen… “come what may”. Tweet @TrashedFilm and this link to the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UM73CEvwMY.

Then VOD it through Vimeo for $5.99. It’s coffee shop money, certainly worth 98 minutes of your time.

See it, tweet it, trend it. Please. And if you don’t, I might just tell Jeremy. And you can trust me, you don’t want that kind of awkward.

SP.

BALL & FLINT - TRANSMEDIA IN 90 SECONDS

 

I rather liked the idea of taking a very thin slice from between the pages of 'Digital State', and turning it into a piece of promotional content, that was both a single idea and (hopefully) held a little value in its own right.

The result was 'Ball & Flint'.

It's about storytelling in a digital world... expressed in 90 seconds... through a metaphor. 

Yeah, it'll make more sense just watching it.

 

 

 

Director & Producer: Babis Tsoutsas
Motion & Graphic Design: George Zestanakis
Script & Narration: Simon Pont

And to Babis and George, massive thanks.

SP.

Simon Pont on Transmedia (2013)

 

Convergence Culture, 'The Monster', Jaws, District 9, Limitless, The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus and the Mariana trench.

Here's a 9 minute excerpt from my keynote at Meg13, discussing the theory and practice of Transmedia story-telling. 

 

Recorded by SVT on March 7, 2013 @ MEG, Sweden.

 

Massive call-out thanks to agency F&B and to Meg for the very kind invitation.

To watch the full length 30 minute keynote, click here.

SP.

The Better Mousetrap Interview by Bob Morris

 

 

In interview with Bob Morris (February 2013):

 

Morris: Before discussing The Better Mousetrap, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your professional development? How so?

 

Pont: You know, there’s never been one stand-out Mr. Miyagi type figure in my career, radiating warmth and charisma and setting the standard. There have been a couple of Buddy Ackerman types – and there’s no need to name real names – but what I am very conscious of is that overall, I’ve actually been very fortunate. There’s been a sizeable cast of characters, mostly very good and only a few questionable, who I’ve learned from. And that’s been hugely instructive in helping me decide what kind of professional I want to be, and the kind that I don’t. But to name a few names for all the right reasons, I’d happily cite Moray MacLennan, Hans Andersson, Jon Wilkins, Greg Grimmer, and Hamish Davies. In each case, and each in their own way, we’re talking about hugely impressive, inspiring, and fundamentally very decent human beings.

 

Morris: Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.

 

Pont: I don’t think there’s ever been just one! I think careers are twisty-turny things full of great highlights, 50-50 judgements calls, and a few near-disasters. Along that road, with hope, you bump into a fair few moments of revelation.

 

Morris: What do you know now about the business world that you wish you knew when you started working full-time? Why?

 

Pont: Stop playing at being a grown-up and just be a grown-up. I think that’s fair advice to anyone in the early days of their career. By definition, when you start out in business, you’re naive, because your only former points of reference are academia and being a student; in most respects, being a “kid”. And it’s only experience that takes the edge off that immaturity. But there is a ‘but’. Once you’ve entered the business world, you’ve entered it, so you might as well stop “pretending”, stop play-acting, drop the pretence, and go at it full-tilt. I think real credibility and success comes from believing in yourself and what you’re capable of, even if you don’t have so much “experience” to draw upon. It’s not an easy message, of course, but self-doubt only gets in your way. So don’t have any. Or at least, work on editing it.

 

Morris: Of all the films that you have seen, which – in your opinion – best dramatizes important business principles? Please explain.

 

Pont: That’s a terrific question. I’m a big film fan. Swimming with Sharks and Wall Street are brilliant yesteryear windows on the working world. Margin Call, from 2011, is another great snapshot on a particular moment in time – but that’s not what you’re asking. Citing movies about the work-place isn’t the same as a movie that necessarily dramatizes business principles.

 

I’ve half-joked that I’d like to use the practices of Jack Bauer in 24 as a model for assertive leadership and an approach to decision-making. Jack could be accused of many things, but procrastination is not one of them. There’s an argument that indecision and atrophy are amongst the very worst business principles. Business, like life, should be about affirmative action. Just imagine: Jack Bauer’s Guide to being CEO.

Morris: Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond. First, from Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

Pont: And, of course, the real trick is knowing who that is! Self-awareness, self-understanding – it’s a lifelong journey for pretty much everyone. That’s my belief, at least. I do think we can learn a lot from others, how they do things, the examples they set. These examples inform the kind of person we want to be, the kind of husband, the kind of parent, the kind of friend and colleague. “Be yourself” is about making and committing to a whole load of decisions… and then accepting that life can only be a permanent work-in-progress.

 

Morris: From Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

 

Pont: Problem-making and problem-solving are certainly different mind-sets. Not just different, they’re mental inversions of each other. It’s how we look upon the water in the glass. You need to look on it as half full… in order to then work out how to fill the remaining half.

 

Morris: Finally, from Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

 

Pont: This is a lovely quote. I love its darkness; the wonderful pathetic-ness of being highly adept at a pointless act. I imagine Drucker received a parking fine or a letter from the tax man the day he penned this dark gem. The quote could be stapled to an internal memo shared amongst a legion of bureaucrats and pen-pushers – whose job it is to file tax returns and serve out parking fines.

 

Morris: In Tom Davenport’s latest book, Judgment Calls, he and co-author Brooke Manville offer “an antidote for the Great Man theory of decision making and organizational performance”:organizational judgment. That is, “the collective capacity to make good calls and wise moves when the need for them exceeds the scope of any single leader’s direct control.” What do you think?

 

Pont: I applaud the sentiment, that it’s a ‘team responsibility’ to do the heavy lifting.

At a practical level, ‘effective leadership’ falls quickly off a cliff if it ends with the ‘leadership team’, as opposed to being something acted upon, that then cascades down to the rest of the organization. So I’d wholly agree with the statement in regards to ‘organizational performance’. Where the logic is potentially more questionable is around a team’s ability to make decisions. I’ve never been a huge fan of decision-by-committee. Multiple agenda’s too often get in the way. And ‘Group Think’ dynamics can also lead to decisions (and then outcomes) that can go seriously south. Part of being a great leader is choosing your team well, picking the kind of expertise and personality blend that can most appropriately advise. But leaving the team to make the call – that’s weak leadership.

Morris: Here’s a brief excerpt from Paul Shoemaker’s latest book, Brilliant Mistakes: “The key question companies need to address is not ‘Should we make mistakes?’ but rather ‘Which mistakes should we make in order to test our deeply held assumptions?’” Your response?

 

Pont: “Brilliant mistakes” is a catchy contradiction. It brings to mind Charles Saatchi’s book from last year, Be The Worst You Can Be”.

 

Of course, no one tries to make mistakes; rather some mistakes are sadly inevitable. Shoemaker’s fundamental message is one I wholly agree with. Companies shouldn’t be so scared to mess up once in a while that, by consequence, they don’t push themselves. It’s a fear of potential failure which causes organisational (read: managerial) paralysis. And the irony is that our world now moves at binary speed, and too many companies move at a human speed set to “risk aversion”. We need to make “indecision and non-commitment” more unacceptable, more unforgivable in fact, than the odd mistake born of trying. And I’m a major believer in testing deeply held assumptions, because quite frankly, even if they were rock-solid yesterday, or even today, there’s no guarantee or given they’ll be effective tomorrow. Our world is just moving too damned fast, and the “digital age” is continually usurping our definitions and understanding of things.

Morris: The greatest leaders throughout history (with rare exception) were great storytellers. What do you make of that?

 

Pont: “Story” is eternal. It’s the definitive way to package a thought or sell-in a vision, because it plays to the biggest rule there is: “know your audience”.

However big or sweeping or grand the theme or thought, anchoring it in narrative and, in particular, the minutia of “human interest” is how we, “The Audience”, can relate and comprehend and ultimately care.

H.G. Wells could have written War of the Worlds any number of ways, could have gone large, as a story across a global tableau, but he didn’t. He wrote it as a first-person experience. He kept a very big idea very small, human, and accessible. And in “that smallness” lies the power of the bigger thought. Great leaders, great story-tellers, they know how to rally people, by addressing issues in a way that makes us instinctively care, because they put us, as individuals, at the heart of the matter.

 

To read the full interview, click here: The Better Mousetrap Interview

 

And to read Bob Morris's review of The Better Mousetrap, click here: US review