The Nature of Narrative in the Age of Networks

I know (and have experienced) that more traditional marketing and advertising techniques can drive people to locations to buy something (especially if it’s on sale), or to websites to see the ends of clever short films, or to TV to watch a show, or to theaters to see films, etc., etc. ad nauseum. Whether or not one believes metrics, analytics and feedback-loops are optimal, we can actually watch the cause-and-effect work.

But I’ve always marveled at how much dough is spent in marketing and advertising, and most of the time for either short-lived or ineffective results. Even those campaigns that purportedly “set the bar” or “break the mold” for the advertising industry seem like squandered opportunities to me. They create a gigantic spark… but they lack the literacy or understanding of how to build “engines” they can ignite using the spark in which they are already investing.

Remember the BMW Films campaign circa 2001/2002?

I have no idea how much money BMW spent on the campaigm, but according to a Fast Company interview with Creative Director Bruce Bildsten of the Fallon agency “It took 100 people at Fallon a year to work on these films.“

Let’s see… let’s say that’s 100 folks at an average, fully-burdened annual salary of $75k (it’s Minneapolis, after all) and that tallies up to $7.5M… just for the agency’s labor costs. That wouldn’t include below-the-line production costs, and the prodigious above-the-line talent costs for the likes of John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie and Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu along with actors Madonna, Stellan Skarasgaard, and Clive Owen as The Driver.

And that doesn’t include the cost to promote the films through buying television, cinema and online promotional space.

For grins, let’s do a bit of estimating. Say a typical 0:30 spot costs on the order of $1M to produce. Each of the BMW films were 8 minutes long. So let’s just be conservative and say they were $5M a piece to producer. That’s an additional $25M for the first five films.

So now we’re at $32.5M to make the films and promote them. Then there’s the media buying.

To buy 0:30 of air time on an average television show is on the order of $250,000. That’s for each time the 0:30 commercial airs. So if BMW bought a total of 40 thirty-second spots to promote the films, that’d be $10M. I think I *personally* saw the commercials that many times.

But let’s just leave it at that for a moment. $32.5M to make and promote; and a $10M media buy. $42,500,000. Wow.

All parties claim it was a huge success. I have little doubt that’s true. They said they topped 200,000 in sales of the Z3 that year, and they claim nearly 30,000,000 viewed the films, among other metrics. They created a big, big bang… a heckuva spark.

But where is it now? Other than lining the resumes of the ad execs and commercial directors, and serving as a case study for up-and-comers? All that money and effort– all that effort to expose large audiences to the BMW films, and hopefully engage them with the BMW brand, fell off a cliff when the money stopped flowing. Five years later, I can’t even get to the bmwfilms.com website.

The point? $40-50 MILLION is plenty of money with which to launch something that has a *chance* to be self-sustaining long after the spark is gone. Why not use the spark to ignite an engine that keeps on running, even self-perpetuating? With a small twist in strategy, and a bit of creative and technical augmentation that uses native programming techniques in networked media (web, wireless, etc), in addition to achieving the core and more traditional goals of a marketing and advertising strategy or campaign, any marketing and advertising effort can be given a very high-probability of creating a perpetual, self-sustaining marketing engine. That is, spark marketing.

Why and how are the subject of this particular blog thread. Stay tuned.