From BMW Films to HBO Voyeur

From BMW Films to HBO VoyeurIn 2008, when advertising gobbled down record money and juries of the ad festivals faced the weariness with resilience, a campaign managed to come out first in The Big Won – the survey of the world’s best marketing communications as measured by the quantity and quality of awards won – with more than double scoring than of second-ranked. It was “Voyeur”, the ad campaign crafted by BBDO New York for HBO.

The story of HBO Voyeur sounds like this: the consumer steps in the shoes of a voyeur character, witness of eight stories he watches through a stripped-away wall of a building in New York. The stories have the classic ingredients: love, hatred, murder, forgiveness, suspense. They connect with one another and are inspired from HBO movies. “The transparent wall” is a life-size projection on the wall of an apartment building in New York using two cutting-edge rear projectors. The experience continues on the campaign’s website where the city slides open with new stories behind the walls, connected to an on-demand movie on HBO. The campaign was the breakthrough of 2008 of integrated media and took home two Grand-Prix from the Cannes Festival and other gold-plated prizes.

Lubars is used to put “Voyeur” campaign into words. “It had I think 11 different distribution channels, it wasn’t just a television campaign with a few things on a side. It was 11 different things that were equally important and all verging on to something much bigger. And that’s new.” Before stating the big idea, the junction point, he rewinds to BMW Films – another legendary campaign he worked on while he was at a smaller, yet highly creative ad-agency: Fallon Worldwide.

BMW Films, a series of short-length features directed by Hollywood’s heavyweights (such as Guy Ritchie and John Woo) and aired over the internet, received the first-ever Titanium Lion in the history of Cannes Festival. In his almost 30 years in advertising, Lubars gathered loads of trophies at big ad festivals: Cannes, Clio, Andy, D&AD, Effie, EMMY.

But now, in 2009, we’re talking about something different: the will to dig up for an idea big and good enough to be replicated on all mediums that cross your mind, and to be fit for each one of them.

“Back in the early 2000’s just doing something online was new and different. But the films themselves were just little films. That’s all it was. The next phase was to do films online, but then also do films on cell phone, do a website that you can interact with and discover and find things. Talk with bloggers, have a wall projection that looks like a piece of art on the side of a building. And then we did a film on the television station HBO, an on-demand film. We also did commercials in print and guerilla postings that you didn’t know it was part of it unless you knew. Over three hours of content, if you really dug deep enough to find it.

That’s very different from a 6 minutes film”.

How to persuade the consumer to voluntarily come see you?

How to persuade the consumer to voluntarily come see you?In case of HBO Voyeur, the big idea, big enough to be extended on 11 mediums, was HBO’s power of storytelling, whose fictions go beyond the TV screens. Instead of saying that in a commercial, BBDO New York preferred to show it: on the wall of the building, on the mobile phones’ screens, on websites, on blogs.

Can you find an idea just as big irrespective to the brand you are working for? Of course, says Lubars. The next campaign that the creative officer expects to be as well received as “Voyeur” is “Ram Challenge”, made for Dodge Ram and launched in early 2009. The promotion campaign that begins with the central idea of a reality-like program is made up of a series of “webisodes”, where pairs of cowboys, military men, firefighters and contractors race in an obstacle-course driving competition, at the wheel of a Dodge Ram truck.

“I don’t think that a truck is any different from HBO”.

Even if the website of the campaign has been intensely promoted on TV, “Ram Challenge” moulds along Lubars’ line of vision over the future of advertising: a piece of content that people will seek voluntarily. Advertising that is no longer served to you, that you don’t want to avoid but that you come and see willfully. Real entertainment.

And if the consumer comes voluntarily to the advertising, you considerably cut essential spending, especially in times of crisis: media spending.

“That’s why digital is so important, because it doesn’t cost much in media to be on digital. You have to have some kind of good piece of content that people will seek voluntarily. So it really has to be highly creative”, Lubars says. “I think that highly creative companies are the ones that clients go to in a bad time because you got to get your costumer to voluntarily come see you”.

As it happens, BBDO New York is the most creative agency in the world, according to The Big Won (and BBDO Worldwide – the most creative network). Thus, Lubars’ theory applies in this case: recently, BBDO won the creative duties of Starbucks and a part of Hewlett-Packard, victories that, as manager notes, wipe out the loss of Pepsi over TBWA/Chiat/Day, in last year’s fall.

“You can do well on a bad economy if you make smart decisions and people know what you do. That’s where we’re heading”.

Financial crisis, seen from New York

Financial crisis, seen from New YorkFinancial crisis did not get itself intimidated by the creativity of BBDO and sent a shiver up ad persons’ spines. In November, BBDO Detroit cut 145 jobs, nearly 22% of its workforce, after its main client, Chrysler reduced the marketing budget, according to Advertising Age. A month later, BBDO North America was discharging 189 employees, as part of Omnicom’s strategy to shrink workforce by 3,500.

For David Lubars, the reduction stage ended. “BBDO had last year a reduction. The people we have here – a few people can do a lot of work. We’re in a good shape for now”.

The ad agency is now trying to seek anticrisis solutions for its clients’ narrowed budgets. Brands are now seeking resources to set them apart, to detach from the competition and to become symbols of the markets they are part of – “that’s how you really win”, says Lubars.

“An idea doesn’t cost anything (..) Clients are looking for brilliant ideas that will set them apart, but they just don’t have all that funds. So you have to be really creative not only in what the idea is, but how you execute it and where you put it”.

For the man who said back in 2004 in an interview to New York magazine that “selling stuff was not his job”, the idea that “money has to be part of your thinking” stated in early 2009 could seem as disagreement. It is not, Lubars replies. “You have that relationship – it’s like a marriage, right? (Brands/clients) have a relationship with their consumer, they get married, and then they plot their lives together and they help each other. The client helps the consumer by giving him these cool important products that he needs and then the consumer helps by buying them. But you need to have the relationship before you can have them helping each other”.

The idea of a marriage would rule out the panicked search for in-quarter earnings that many Romanian marketers invoke when it comes to clients’ preferences in times of crisis. “You want to make sure clients remain on a solid ground now, there’s no doubt about it. But I don’t think any client wants to abandon everything they’ve been to short term results. And then, when things get better again, they lost all the cache they had and why people loved them. You have to do both: short term results, but you have to still keep your eye on the long term. Because otherwise, if you trade everything you’ve earned to short term sales, when things get better you have no value anymore”.

Some of the brands that Lubars is trying to build up “marriages” for are General Electric, AT&T, FedEx, HBO, BBC, Starbucks, HP, Monster.

Printing remains one of the most creative, interesting and fascinating advertising mediums

In times when journalists, advertisers and agencies herald the death of printed press (if they’re not talking about the death of advertising, in general), Lubars says it is still breathing. “It’s the oldest medium and what’s fascinating is that it seems to still be one of the most creative and interesting and effective. People love coming home and sitting in a chair with their magazine. With all the new technology, at least in this country, in New York, people love magazines”.

Print is less used in promotion campaigns because the medium offer is broader now, and agencies have more options on the table. However, the mixture should not be deprived from print - if the medium is relevant for the campaign's message.

“When I look back it was boring when there were just three mediums: you’re going to do a commercial, you’re going to do an ad, whatever. And what you did within it was interesting. You don’t even know what you’re going to do now, so this makes it much more interesting for the people who are comfortable within chaos more than rigid formulas”.

If the print is not outworn, then what are the rules that don’t apply anymore in 2009? “I think everything that pretends things are fine or ignores what is happening today would make the client seem like they don’t get it. And I see a lot of ads now that I can tell were done last year and are running now, but they aren’t relevant now. There has to be kind of an inner acknowledgement of what’s going on now.

Tasteless spending or rich pissing around money is not a good thing to depict, there are a lot of people hurting out there”.

This year, David Lubars will chair the Film and Press Juries at Cannes Lions Festival. He expects to see something surprising, fresh and never done before. After 30 years in advertising, he still expects surprises from the industry he is part of, where the “the cement never hardens, where it is always liquid”.