Martin Scorsese has written, directed and even stars in this wonderfully entertaining piece of branded content. It's called The Key to Reserva and is a mockumentary homage to Hitchcock for Freixenet wine. The client and JWT Spain's marketing strategy is to annually approach a film star to be in their advertising primarily for the Spanish TV market. This year they approached a great filmmaker to make a short film, especially thinking about new platforms like the the net, as now the whole online world can watch it whenever they like and hopefully forever with little or no expense on media. This leads me to say that hopefully some of that old media budget can now be invested more in the creative. The Key to Reserva was produced by my employer, RSA Films out of our NYC office.
Brands and agencies are coming to the realization of how to fully exploit the online platform and now that content is king. You have to give everyone content that's compelling enough for all to want to seek out and also realize that whatever you produce is going live forever online now. It's also obvious that great content, will be blogged, commented on, forwarded, producing great WOM which only drives more views that drives more user generated content and hopefully leads to greater sales and greater ROI for a brand.
The client and agency gave a great artist the freedom to make a piece of entertainment of his choice as opposed to employing him to direct an over researched, focus grouped to death, regulatory unoffensive idea from creatives working to a strict planning brief that has to be usually squeezed into the interrupted advertising thirty second media space.
There's hopefully an exciting future for branded content, especially after what's been decided this week in the European Parliament. The regulatory walls are slowly coming down. Having talent make whatever they like, under the proviso they knit the brand (hopefully not too overtly) into their narrative is the way to go, although here Scorsese clearly mocks the classic product shot. Also hopefully the growth of dramatic (branded) content online, we will see brands or product placement becoming less and less overt and so seeing brands accepting a much more subtle association with great entertainment. They will hpefully use other forms of offline and online marketing to indirectly engage people in their brands, so pushing us to something that will eventually become purely entertainment.
The client and the agency must become much more trusting and less controlling of the talent and their brand. As 'Jesse Alexander, producer and writer on Heroes speaking at Futures of Entertaiment @ MIT, spoke about how brand integration wasn't a problem as long as the brands creatively engaged with the show: 'As long as you let me do it organically in a way that works and helps me tell a story. Get me in the room with the advertisers and let me engage with them creatively.' via Faris Yakob. You have to give the power to storytellers.
I am reading Get Smashed by Sam Delaney, an early history of advertising, from the early 1960's, in the early years of TV advertising. At the agency CDP, when a client didn't like an idea, the account man was sent back to persuade the client that the idea was right and if they still disagreed, the agency would sack the client. Those days are long gone. Nowadays advertising has become far too regulated, leading to safe, uncreative formulaic work most of the time. So giving the established talent the freedom to produce their magic, everyone, the brand and it's image and values, the agency and it's reputation are all in the long run indirectly rewarded by engaging content like this. Can you imagine going to Cannes Advertising Festival and it evolving into more of a mini film festival, having more in common with Cannes Film Festival and you'd watch much more engaging, entertaining and satisfying short narrative content?
Once our big screen TVs and a much faster broadband connection converge we will hopefully see content like this in abundance. We have to push for more of these ideas as very soon that big screen in our homes (like our laptops) will be fully interactive with email, IM, virtual worlds, search, shopping, online games, user generated content (blogs, podcasts, web video), RSS and social networking all competing with the old TV channel model. Content is going to have to work much harder for our attention with all these new emerging and engaging forms of entertainment. The days of traditional TV dominating that screen in our living rooms are over.
Here's some stills and the link to the film below.
Finally the brand asks us to communicate with them, asking us to suggest next years choice of director. This obvious brand engagement means they have your email and other useful demo info too so they can annually send us a link to all their future film content as well as being able to work out the worldwide audience demographic too so being able to pinpoint particular content to produce. There's also a blog where you can leave comments too. I look forward to seeing a more challenging director having the opportunity to make a more risky less product placement based film for the brand. Maybe Tarantino, maybe Michael Mann? Brandweek blogs here on how losing control of brand can have positive results.
Here's the film. It was lit by Harris Savides (American Gangster) and edited (and featured on camera too) by long time editor Thelma Schoonmaker - Enjoy.
