BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft) is one of the world’s leading luxury carmakers. Founded and based in the Germany, BMW group employed over 100,000 people, making and distributing a series of successful, premium-priced passenger cars and motorcycles. In addition to its manufacturing operations, BMW also provides financial services to support its worldwide sales and distribution of cars and motorcycles.
In 2000 BMW posted total sales of $33 billion, a slight decrease from its 1999 earnings of $34 billion. Afraid of further backsliding, the Bavarian automaker decided to reshape its advertising to better target the Internet-savvy BMW customer. Before 2001 the company’s advertisements had typically consisted of product-driven campaigns with immaculate BMWs clinging to mountain roads. BMW asked its longtime advertising partner, Fallon Worldwide, to create something different. In 2001 five action-packed short films emerged under the campaign title ‘‘The Hire,’’ which became one of the most acclaimed campaigns in advertising history.
Three different BMW/Fallon campaigns preceding ‘‘The Hire’’ had mostly consisted of ‘‘hard-driving, product-focused efforts designed to show what it’s like behind the wheel of a BMW,’’ Jim McDowell, vice president of marketing at BMW North America, told Advertising Age. BMW and Fallon felt their campaigns’ flavor had been so overused by competitors that the original uniqueness had washed out. Wanting to launch a more unprecedented campaign, BMW asked Fallon for something new, but Fallon’s creatives felt confined within the restraints of traditional television spots. They wanted to show BMWs for longer periods of time and to truly push BMW’s performance to the point of damaging the car, which was something unheard of for a car commercial. ‘‘In response to our plea,’’ Bildsten said in an interview with Shoot, ‘‘[BMW] sent us this letter that was just amazing. They were telling us, ‘Take off the gloves. Do whatever you want. We want you to really stretch.’ ’’ After finishing a Timex campaign that included the use of video clips in Internet advertising, David Carter and Joe Sweet, two of Fallon’s art directors, were eager to try different filming techniques. ‘‘One night I challenged [Carter and Sweet] to come up with something cinematic,’’ Bildsten told Brandweek. ‘‘They came back the next morning with the whole idea almost completely worked out.’’ When they took it to BMW, ‘‘it took us about 30 minutes to present and 10 seconds for them to give us a green light.’’
After working with BMW to develop the idea of a James Bond-type hero who drove various BMWs, Fallon enlisted David Fincher’s film-production company, Anonymous Content. Fincher then successfully wrangled some of Hollywood’s biggest guns to create the five short films. Three more films were created in 2002 to promote BMW’s new Z4 roadster. All eight starred Clive Owen as the ‘‘hired’’ driver who found himself driving a BMW in every spot. ‘‘The Hire’’ was promoted much like a feature film would have been, with movie trailers, print ads, and Web ads.
Short subplots, which loosely linked the campaign’s first five storylines, were filmed quickly, and with a digital video camera, by Ben Younger and Director of Photography William Rexer. The filming of one scene, which looked like a real-life occurrence to most onlookers, involved a ‘‘car thief’’ slamming a ‘‘hit man’’ onto a car hood in New York. ‘‘Some of the reactions I got from people who weren’t real extras were so good that we had to hunt people down [to get permission to include them in the films],’’ Younger said in an interview with Shoot magazine. ‘‘I loved the reaction of one armored-car guy, so we paused the frame, took down the name on the side of the truck, and called the company to get a waiver from him.’’
Since its launch “The Hire”has been singled out as the first high profile, big-budget, celebrity-laden Internet marriage of advertising and entertainment. It has been reviewed, scrutinized, deconstructed and cited as evidence of the perilous future for traditional advertising. New York Times film critic (Elvis Mitchell) called the series “a marriage of commerce and creativity, straddling the ever-dwindling line between arts and merchandising.” BMWFilms is simply the latest and possibly the hippest Web site to make use of streaming video in order to lure prospective customers. Fast cars, mysterious passengers, Buddhist monks, rock superstars, and sinister enemies are all part of the film series, which are presented in installments by some of Hollywood’s top directors. These films are being advertised on television the same way that movie trailers are advertised; the difference is that instead of the catch phrase “coming soon to a theater near you,” this catch phrase reads “see it only on BMWFilms.com.”
Advertising Strategy
Initially, Fallon and BMW had decided to film one serialized 45-to-60-minute film featuring a suave hero who saved, kidnapped, and escorted people using different BMW models. Fallon approached production company Anonymous Content, headed by David Fincher (director of Se7en and Fight Club), to produce the film. Fincher recommended that the spots be broken into five different films in order to facilitate file downloading and allow more flexibility in attracting talent to work on the project.
Following Fincher’s advice, Fallon developed scripts for five short films. In producing ‘‘The Hire,’’ Fincher and Fallon went so far as to create a dossier, complete with FBI and CIA files, just to flesh out the films’ hero. Fincher then solicited some of Hollywood’s top directors. The final list included Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate), Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express), Guy Ritchie (Snatch), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros). The scripts, ranging from dark to hilarious, were distributed according to each director’s style. Anonymous Content chairman Steve Golin told Shoot, ‘‘The good news is that these weren’t commercials. We had very few restrictions. The budgets were equivalent to [those of] high-end commercials.’’
Fallon flipped the advertising equation upside down by spending 90 percent of its budget on production and only 10 percent on media. The reduced media expenditure was initially seen as a huge risk. According to Advertising Age’s Creativity, a BMW rep warned Fallon, ‘‘Either nobody will notice, or this will be a smashing success.’’
For each of the six-to-seven-minute films, subplots were also created in an attempt to weave the film storylines together. British actor Clive Owen, whose character became the common thread for the entire campaign, always played the skillful hired driver. Frankenheimer’s ‘‘Ambush,’’ the campaign’s debut film, first became available for download on BMWfilms on April 26, 2001. It featured the hired driver saving a diamond smuggler from machine-gun toting assailants in a cargo van. Fallon released each of the following four spots every two weeks. Typical Hollywood methods, including broadcast spots, billboards, and free posters, were used to promote the films. Print ads ran in Hollywood trade magazines Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone. The trailers for ‘‘The Hire,’’ resembling regular movie trailers, aired on VH1, Bravo, and the Independent Film Channel. One of Fallon’s biggest challenges was to pitch the films as entertainment but to still disclose BMW’s involvement. ‘‘We wanted to avoid the ‘microbrew syndrome,’’’ Bildsten explained to Brandweek, ‘‘like where you look down and see that [your beer] was actually made by Anheuser-Busch.’’ ‘‘The Hire’’ was also uniquely filmed to fit computer screens. ‘‘No one had ever done an internet project of this magnitude, and we had a lot to learn,’’ Fallon producer Robyn Boardman told Advertising Age’s Creativity. ‘‘There are different things to keep in mind when shooting for the web. File size, for starters, and the fact that wide shots don’t play well.’’
Due to overwhelming Web traffic, ad-industry praise, and BMW’s bottom-line success in 2002, a ‘‘second season’’ consisting of three films began airing October 24, 2002. The second crop involved an equally renowned roster of names. Instead of Anonymous Content, all spots were produced by Ridley Scott (director of Blade Runner and Gladiator), who recruited directors Tony Scott (Top Gun), John Woo (Face/Off ), and Joe Carnahan (Narc). The actors included Gary Oldman, James Brown, Don Cheadle, Ray Liotta, and of course, Clive Owen, returning to star in the final three films. The last of the films was released at the end of 2002.
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