I've been reading a lot lately on the evolutionary advantages of storytelling—first in Brian Boyd's monumental On the Origin of Stories, which treats art in general and stories in particular as an adaptive response, and now in Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal, which describes fiction as "a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life." So when Jason Silva (who was featured in conversation on this blog last month) posted a video the other day about the evolutionary edge that stems from the state of wonder, I took notice.
Jason's video was inspired by his own reading—in particular, Nicholas Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, which the Times Book Review described as "exuberant," and Ross Andersen's "Golden Eye," an essay on the marvels of deep space that appeared in the LA Review of Books. Jason borrowed the title for his video from Humphrey, but the exuberance is all his own. Enjoy.
Yesterday saw the release of one of the most compelling TED talks ever: Peter Weyland's in the year 2023. Of course, 2023 hasn't really happened yet, and neither has Sir Peter. But both will arrive soon enough—in June, to be precise, with the release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. The TED talk—performed by Guy Pearce, who plays the seriously overreaching CEO of Weyland Corp. in the film—is one of those great in-fiction artifacts that make the boundary between entertainment and reality so fungible these days.
Pearce's stentorian delivery makes him the perfect TED orator: He comes across as a sort of Richard Branson on steroids. As the camera sweeps the stage, he holds its gaze relentlessly:
At this moment in our civilization, we can create cybernetic individuals who in just a few short years will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: We are the gods now. For those of you who know me, you will be aware by now that my ambition is unlimited. . . . For those of you who do not know me, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Peter Weyland, and if you'll indulge me, I'd like to change the world.
Directed by Luke Scott, Ridley's son, and written by Damon Lindelof, who co-wrote the screenplay for the movie, the video is presented on the TED site in deadpan fashion, with an "about the speaker" write-up that details Weyland's role in launching "the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth." In a Q&A on the TED blog, Lindelof says, "I never thought in my wildest dreams we would get the actual TED branding." But he got in touch with TED's Tom Rielly, and pretty soon they were on.
Lindelof has been involved in this sort of thing before, of course. In May 2006, when he and Carlton Cuse were exec-producing Lost, ABC ran an ad for the fictitious Hanso Foundation. This turned out to be a rabbithole for The Lost Experience, the alternate reality game that played out that summer. Two years later, ABC ran a spot and even put up billboards for Oceanic Airlines, whose plane crash kicked the whole thing off.
But Lindelof is hardly the only one to use real-world media outlets to spread an in-fiction narrative. This past December, as part of its viral experience for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 42 Entertainment produced a vintage episode of Hard Copy that contained disturbing allegations about the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. And back in July 2008, a few days before Mad Men began its second season on AMC, Advertising Age published a special issue from 1960 that featured actual ads from purported clients of Sterling Cooper as well as an amusing interview with creative director Don Draper:
How do you think this new medium, television, will change the way advertising talks to consumers--and how will it affect advertising in general?
Well, the first thing I've noticed, it seems to be more about show business, not just putting ads into television shows without irritating viewers. But the ads themselves have to tell stories, have music, have striking images, be entertaining--maybe even more entertaining than the shows. It's going to be a tough one.
In its advertising column, the New York Times reported that Lionsgate, which produces the show, paid for the fake issue of Ad Age (actually a 16-page insert in a regular issue) at the suggestion of its media agency, Initiative. So far, the Times itself has not (knowingly) been sucked into anyone's fictional narrative. I'm waiting.
Several months ago, as I was finishing a video on the making of The Art of Immersion, Paul Woolmington of Naked Communications suggested I use the book's YouTube channel to create a conversation about the issues the book raises—for example, how the Internet blurs the distinction between author and audience, story and game, entertainment and marketing, fiction and reality. It's taken awhile, what with my travel schedule and a bit of consulting work I've taken on, but the idea is finally being realized. First up: Chad Stoller, managing director of the newly opened IPG Media Lab in New York, on the blurring of entertainment and marketing—otherwise known as branded entertainment.
One thing Chad talks about is how hard it is as an ad guy to compete with the average 14-year-old on YouTube. Don Draper never had to worry about this, but it's an issue I'm well aware of. Suffice it to say that I'll be studying a lot of 14-year-olds' videos over the next few weeks and may even start taking lessons from one.
In the meantime, I expect to produce one of these videos every few weeks, talking not just with people in the advertising business but those in entertainment and journalism as well. The first few, however, will most likely be from the ad world. Look for interviews with Scott Donaton, CEO of the branded entertainment unit Ensemble (and Chad's colleague at IPG), and Graham Hodge, director of branded content and creative services at LBi London. This spring I'll be speaking at South by Southwest and ad:tech Sydney, so look for some interviews from there as well. Who else would you like to see? Suggestions welcome.
Everywhere I go this year, I seem to run into a branded content discussion. From DIY Days in New York, to the “Brisk: Machete” panel I did with Robert Rodriguez and Danny Trejo at SXSW interactive, to the Branded Content Salon I spoke at at LBi London, to Morgan Spurlock’s POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold at Hot Docs and Sheffield, the idea that brands can commission entertainment instead of merely advertising in it keeps popping up. The subject is not entirely new, of course: the term “advertainment” was coined more than a decade ago. It’s the momentum that's changing—picking up in large part because (Spurlock’s clever satire notwithstanding) producers are embracing it as readily as marketers.
The reasons why started to become apparent when two of America's most prolific and respected indie film producers, Ted Hope and Christine Vachon, sat down for a "fireside chat" at DIY Days in March. These are the people behind such ground-breaking and uncompromising films of the '90s and '00s as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Velvet Goldmine, and Boys Don't Cry (Vachon) and Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, The Laramie Project, and Human Nature (Hope). So it was instructive to hear them speaking unabashedly about how attitudes toward commercialism have evolved in 20 years.
A big factor in that evolution has been economics. As Vachon pointed out, the '90s were the heyday of international co-productions: The path to success was to get a script, wrangle some talent, and cut a lot of deals at Cannes. But eventually, that started to dry up--and then the recession hit. Attitudes changed accordingly. You can view this with cynicism, of course, but you can just as readily argue that artists, who live like the rest of us in a relentlessly commercial society, began demonstrating a refreshing lack of hypocrisy about it. As Hope said, "Who does it benefit to draw a line between art and commerce, marketing and content?" Ultimately, it's all storytelling.
The obvious question is, does the branding sway the storytelling? So I raised it when Ted and I met for a drink a few weeks later. His answer was, sure--but so does everything else. He offered American Splendor, his 2003 biopic of comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, as an example: "I said, I'm going to make a film that's going to win at Sundance." (It did, and the film critics' award at Cannes as well.) "It gave me a higher awareness of market-based writing."
But it's not just artists whose attitudes have evolved; it's also corporate marketers, a point Rodriguez made at SXSW. The panel--staged by PepsiCo, the corporate entity behind Brisk Iced Tea, at its Plugged-In Stage at the Austin Convention Center--paired Rodriguez and Trejo, the Latino star of last year's Machete, with Brisk brand manager Jamal Henderson and Ian Kovalik of the San Francisco ad shop Mekanism. (PepsiCo gets its own branded space at SXSW because it's a "super sponsor" of the festival.) Machete, introduced years earlier in a fake trailer that appeared in the Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature Grindhouse, was a hyperviolent actioner in the B-movie tradition--not exactly the sort of thing you'd think would inspire a corporate marketing campaign. Yet PepsiCo was happy to take the leap. A movie with an Hispanic star and a cult following among twenty-somethings, for a "value brand" (99 cents a liter) that hadn't advertised in nearly a decade? "From a brand perspective, it was divine intervention almost," Henderson told me before we sat down for the discussion. "We were trying to get back into the popular culture, and this seemed the way to do it."
The success of their effort was apparent as soon as we ran the spot. People in the room, most of whom must have watched it a half-dozen times or more already, started whooping with delight the instant the reel began. The 60-second video is essentially a parody of a parody--a claymation version of Trejo as Machete, a Mexican federale who wields a wicked-looking pair of knives while yelling "Negotiate! Negotiate! Negotiate!" It's also very, very funny. Rodriguez, who had made stop-motion movies as a kid, not only gave his okay for the spot, he actually tweeted about it when it came out:
Thank you @mekanism for making that killer Machete Lipton Brisk commercial. Fantastic work! Stop Motion is still king. Updated via web at Thursday, January 06, 2011 11:06 PM
Meanwhile, Rodriguez was making some branded content of his own--a six-minute video for Nike's Kobe Bryant Collection, with Bryant in the starring role and cameos from Trejo, Bruce Willis, and Kanye West. The video was presented as a mini-movie--"Kobe Bryant Is The Black Mamba"--and advertised as such, both in 30-second spots and in a giant billboard on the Sunset Strip. Anticipating Spurlock's tongue-in-cheek approach to product placement by several months, Rodriguez framed the video as a director's pitch to the star/brand manager. Sample dialogue:
BRYANT
So. Are there gonna be a lot of close-ups on the shoes?
RODRIGUEZ
Product placement gives us a bigger budget. Bigger budget, bigger explosions.
"I don't usually do ads," Rodriguez said during the discussion. "I've done a couple of European ones with George Clooney, he's a friend of mine--they're more cutting-edge over there, you can do a little more different stuff. . . . And then this one came up because they said you can do whatever you want. So when I talked to Kobe I said, Okay, let's do something that deals with legends and icons--you know, you're a legend, Kanye in the music world is a legend, Bruce Willis is a legend, Trejo is a legend, the brand Nike has its own legendary status. So I wanted to do something that kind of put all that together."
"They're actually cool shoes," Trejo said, putting his right foot forward to show off his swoosh.
"Celebrities don't do commercials here because it's just not cool," Rodriguez continued. "But you make it cool, they'll show up. Nike couldn't believe it."
"That thing was so cool, people were actually waiting for the movie," Trejo added. "People were asking me, Are they gonna do that as a movie?"
Obviously, not every bit of branded entertainment is going to be stuffed with legends. But it can still be fun, as Philips demonstrated with the Nigel & Victoria Web series it showed off at LBi London. Created for the Dutch electronics giant by Hoot Comedy, a London shop that specializes in, yes, branded content, Nigel & Victoria is another arched-eyebrow production that seeks to tout its brand and mock it too. What makes it particularly intriguing is the way the whole series acts as a none-too-veiled metaphor for the increasingly if sometimes awkwardly intimate relationship between brand and content.
The series focuses on Nigel, the handsome young "Philips guy" who's overseeing the production of some commercials for the company's consumer line, and Victoria, the comely blond actress who's been hired to star in them. Nigel has developed sort of a thing for content--er, Victoria--and his bumbling courtship seems destined to go on indefinitely, or at least until the end of season one. (Season two, which began two weeks ago, takes a different tack.) Will Nigel win Victoria's heart? Will his clumsiness turn her off completely, or can he charm his way into her affections? Will they ever make squalling, red-faced little brand-content babies? Stay tuned for the next episode.
If there's a lesson in Nigel's courtship of Victoria, or in Rodriguez's pitch to Kobe, or in Machete's exploits for Brisk, it's that you can never bullshit the viewer. Forget the sales pitch: Nobody cares any more. The litmus test, the thing brand managers have to accept if they're to survive in this cool new world, is that branded entertainment has to work as entertainment if it's to work at all. Don't take your brand too seriously. Go with your gut, assuming you have one. Otherwise, you're just making television spots for viewers to TiVo through.
"Creativity, Celebrity and Brand Strategy: A Brisk Discussion of Ozzy and Machete" takes place at 4:30 PM Monday at the Austin Convention Center's PepsiCo Plugged-In Stage.
What happens when you blur the line between advertising and entertainment? In the case of "Brisk Machete," a minute-long stop-motion video in which Danny Trejo reprises his role in Robert Rodriguez's Machete on behalf of Brisk Iced Tea, something very funny indeed.
On Monday afternoon at SXSW I'll be talking about how it went down with Trejo, Rodriguez, Jamal Henderson of PepsiCo, and Ian Kovalik of Mekanism.
The "Brisk Machete" video, which first appeared on YouTube in late December, kicked off a campaign for Lipton Brisk iced tea—a brand that last advertised ten years ago in a still-remembered stop-motion campaign. Last summer, with sales already rising dramatically, the brand managers at PepsiCo decided to kick things up a notch. They went to Mekanism, a San Francisco-based creative agency well known for its animation work, with the idea of reviving the stop-motion campaign.
Henderson had just been to the downtown LA premiere of Machete, where he saw Trejo ride up on his chopper at the head of low-rider procession. So when Mekanism suggested a Machete take-off to launch the Brisk campaign, it seemed like serendipity.
Trejo was game, and Rodriguez gave the project his blessing. But as Trejo eventually discovered, there are responsibilities that come with being a spokesLatinsuperhero. The other day he was outside a 7-11 in the San Ferdando Valley when a little girl walked by with her mom. When the girl realized he was drinking a Pepsi, she did a double-take and declared in the most gravelly voice she could manage, "That's not Brisk, baby!"
Hulu, the online TV service launched two years ago by Fox and NBC, has enjoyed incredible success with viewers — too much, it may turn out.
Two weeks ago, comScore’s report that Hulu had pulled into the top three streaming-video sites was quickly followed by news that Disney — the corporate parent of ABC and ESPN—was taking a stake in the venture. But in the long run, those two milestones could be overshadowed by a seemingly much smaller bit of news: the decision in January to pull most episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from the site.
Instead of carrying every episode of Sunny, a way off-center Danny DeVito comedy that languished on FX until Hulu users made it one of the site’s most popular programs, Hulu limited its offering to the five most recent shows. User reaction to the move was swift and predictable. “Well, off to the torrent sites,” one wrote on Hulu’s Sunny forum. “Hulu blows!” declared another. “Whose retarded idea was that?”
Well, not Hulu’s. The move was taken at the network’s request. Powerful forces are working against free, legal online TV — and the decision to pull Sunny may have made that show the canary in the server farm.
In theory, at least, the availability of such shows on Hulu threatens two of the key financial underpinnings of cable TV: DVD sales and carriage fees. Comcast and its brethren pay the cable networks to carry their programming, and the idea that Internet users can watch the same shows online for free is not popular in places like, well, Philadelphia — or at least that corner of it where Comcast is headquartered. Stock analysts aren’t exactly thrilled with the concept, either.
Shortly after removing the Sunny episodes, Hulu took another unpopular step: It shut off access to its programming from Boxee, the fledgling service that enables you to stream online video to your TV set. In a blog posted titled “Doing Hard Things,” Hulu CEO Jason Kilar apologized to users. “Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product,” he wrote, “and we are respecting their wishes.”
It’s not hard to see what’s at work here. If cable and satellite operators are threatened by your ability to watch free shows on your computer, imagine how they feel about letting you watch free shows on your TV. What if people decide they can do without those expensive bundles of programming? Of course, companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable don’t even begin to replicate Hulu’s breadth — its readiness to stream every episode of every series it can get its hands on — or its ease of use. The BitTorrent sites aren’t exactly a breeze, but at least they let you get what you want.
Kilar, a longtime Amazon exec, knows what the Internet is teaching audiences to expect: The ability to watch any show, day or night. And he’s adept at explaining this new reality in a way that emphasizes its potential. “This is a tectonic shift,” he told me last year, “and what it does is allow network heads to find the audience they always should have had but couldn’t reach.” But not everybody sees it that way.
A story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times sums up what he’s facing: Fear. It’s certainly understandable. Television networks, and the Hollywood studios that make programming for them, are experiencing declining ad sales, declining DVD sales, and rising panic. “We have to find ways to advance the business rather than cannibalize it,” said the distribution chief at Turner — a network that refuses to make shows like The Closer available on Hulu and keeps only a few episodes on its own site.
That would be nice, but the problem is that if you don’t cannibalize yourself, somebody else will do it for you. “You can’t protect old business models artificially,” I was told by Peter Chernin, the outgoing president of Fox’s parent company, News Corporation. Television execs who doubt him might want to check with their friends in the newspaper industry.
Or better yet, just look at the paper itself. The same startlingly thin issue of the LA Times that carried the Hulu story featured an article about Craigslist and its policies regarding classifieds, most of which are free. Not so long ago, classified ads were a dependable cash cow for the newspaper business. But yesterday’s Craigslist article was followed, in the print edition, by a mere three pages of classifieds, liberally padded by display ads for the Times itself, with another three pages lurking at the end of the sports section. This for a metropolitan area of nearly 13 million people.
That guy on Hulu’s user forum who was turning to the Torrent sites? Kilar reads these forums all the time. The executives who control Hulu’s programming should do the same.
