THE HIRE CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
In 2000 Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (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.
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—including directors Guy Ritchie and John Frankenheimer and actors Madonna, Forrest Whittaker, and Mickey Rourke—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 (Croupier, The Bourne Identity) 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.
The five initial films cost an estimated $15 million, and the three made in 2002 cost about $10 million. ‘‘The Hire’’ catapulted BMW’s exposure into film festivals, awards shows, and even an exclusive BMW DirecTV channel. By 2002 BMW sales were up 17 percent, while some of its competitors, such as Volkswagen and General Motors, floundered. By June 2003 more than 45 million people had viewed the films, overshooting the original goal of reaching 2 million viewers. ‘‘The Hire’’ garnered numerous ad industry awards. The campaign’s final spot, ‘‘Beat the Devil,’’ aired November 21, 2002.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
BMW, founded in Germany in 1913, awarded most of its advertising work to the Minneapolis-based agency Fallon in the mid-1990s. 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.’’

TARGET MARKET
‘‘The Hire’’ largely arose from Fallon and BMW’s growing concern that past campaigns had been missing the company’s target audience: well-to-do, high-achieving males who usually researched purchases using the Internet and lacked the time to watch network television. Research showed that consumers inclined to purchase BMWs were also broadband-connected, tech-savvy males and that 85 percent of this population studied BMW’s cars online before even stepping into a showroom. As far as whom the campaign would appeal to, McDowell explained to Advertising Age, ‘‘We would have guessed that our central tendency would have been 25-year-olds, but actually from our early measurements we got people older and more affluent than that.’’ Knowing that the mature target audience was keener on the viewing experience than on the interactive experience, Fallon purposely avoided using gaming software on the campaign’s website, http://www.bmwfilms.com. To study the effectiveness of ‘‘The Hire,’’ BMW and Fallon devised units of measurement called ‘‘BMW minutes,’’ which calculated how much time viewers spent with the new Internet campaign compared to previous television campaigns. ‘‘We were astonished to discover that a major fraction of the total BMW minutes were Internet minutes,’’ McDowell told Advertising Age. Males made up 68 percent of the viewers, 42 percent of whom came from households with incomes greater than $75,000. The second suite of ‘‘The Hire’’ films featured BMW’s new Z4 roadster, which aimed at a demographic that could hopefully afford them. In late 2002 BMW began running its eight films on an exclusive BMW channel for DirecTV. The channel, which was available for a limited time, interspersed the films with behindthe-scenes footage and special ‘‘subplot’’ spots.

COMPETITION
Mercedes-Benz, the German luxury arm of DaimlerChrysler, was the top-selling luxury brand in the United States in 1999, a position it maintained until losing ground to BMW and to Toyota’s Lexus in 2002. For the same year’s first 10 months Mercedes units sold dropped by 1,500, losing out to BMW’s incredible 17 percent sales growth that year. ‘‘Mercedes has been improving its quality but it hasn’t been keeping pace with the rest of the U.S. industry,’’ Brian Walters, director of quality research at J.D. Power and Associates, explained to Bloomberg News. In an attempt to reproduce BMW’s campaign success, Mercedes’s London-based ad agency, Campbell Doyle Dye, faked a movie trailer for a supposed upcoming film called Lucky Star. Never admitting to be just an advertisement, the movie ‘‘trailer’’ broke in U.K. movie theaters July 4, 2002. Lucky Star pretended to be the next release from producer Michael Mann (The Aviator, Collateral) and portrayed Benicio Del Toro as a man acting independently to clean up Chicago’s commodities exchange. The spot periodically showed Del Toro masterfully speeding through Chicago in a $90,000 Mercedes 500 SL.
Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus luxury division rose up to be the luxury-car industry leader, selling more units than BMW or Mercedes in 2001. Besides the sales success, Lexus dominated as the most reliable in its industry; according to J.D. Power and Associates, Lexus cars had fewer than half of the problems, after four and five years, that the average cars and trucks had. In 2001 Lexus decreased its ad spending. By 2002 the carmaker’s ad agency, California-based Team One Advertising, had focused its efforts on the remodeled ES300 sedan.

SUBPLOTS IN ‘‘THE HIRE’’
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.’’

MARKETING 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 Gonza´lez In˜a´rritu (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 http://www.bmwfilms.com 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.
Even though BMW ended their 10-year relationship with Fallon in 2005, the eight films remained available on http://www.bmwfilms.com.

MADONNA PLAYING THE SPOILED DIVA
The campaign’s fourth film, ‘‘Star,’’ featured a spoiled diva who received her comeuppance after whining and complaining about the slow speed of Clive Owen’s driving. After smirking through a few minutes of her wrath, Owen slammed down the accelerator and ping-ponged the ‘‘star’’ in the backseat for a solid two minutes. Guy Ritchie, the director and cowriter of ‘‘Star,’’ talked his wife, Madonna, into playing the part. ‘‘When he signed on, we didn’t think she’d be along, we just desperately wanted him,’’ Fallon’s Bildsten told Shoot, adding that the actresses originally considered for the role ‘‘were a little more washed-up than her.’’

OUTCOME
‘‘The Hire’’ raked in a plethora of advertising awards, including two Grand Clio Awards and a Grand Prix Cyber Lion at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France, along with Best of Show at the One Show Interactive competition. The campaign was praised not just by the ad industry; it earned kudos within the entertainment arena as well. ‘‘Hostage,’’ from the second series of films, earned the award for Best Action Short during the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival in 2002. Entertainment magazines began reviewing the films. Even the New York Times gave the films a favorable review. Their entertainment value garnered media coverage not accessible to typical advertisement. ‘‘We’d hoped for a good response, but we never thought it would be as strong as it was,’’ Bildsten told Shoot in 2001. ‘‘BMW recorded over eleven million film-views. And according to their research, it really worked. [The films] got people to not just pay attention, but to buy cars.’’ By June 2003 the films had been viewed more than 45 million times. BMW’s sales rose 17.2 percent between 2001 and 2002, helping the automaker to outsell Mercedes and placing it second only to Lexus in the luxury-car market. From an ad industry perspective, the greatest pinnacle of ‘‘The Hire’’ may have been winning the first-ever Titanium Lion, the highest honor at the Cannes International Advertising Festival. The award recognized a campaign that caused ‘‘the industry to stop in its tracks and reconsider the way forward.’’

MINI ROBOTS CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
In 1967 a safety mandate forced the antiquated, cheaply made British Mini Cooper to discontinue sales in the United States. In 1994, when Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) attained control of the Mini Cooper brand, executives were perplexed about how to reintroduce their newly acquired microcar to the United States. Finally reappearing in the United States in 2002, followed by a prolific magazine, Web-based, and outdoor campaign, the MINI, as it had come to be spelled, was a screaming success. By 2004 MINI made up 11 percent of BMW’s sales. Company executives were nervous, however, about the boom-and-bust pitfalls that haunted other trendy cars, like the New Beetle and PT Cruiser. It was for this reason that ‘‘MINI Robots,’’ formulated as a ‘‘viral’’ campaign, a term referring to advertising that relies on word-of-mouth contagiousness, was launched in March 2004.
With an estimated budget of $15 million, ‘‘MINI Robots’’ was developed by Miami-based ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. First a site was developed on the Internet to herald a clandestine project that assembled robots from MINI parts. The project’s mastermind, a fictional Dr. Mayhew, was a retired scientist who posted daily video clips of his experiments. Shortly afterward a second site was published, with sightings of robots slinking through the moonlit streets of Oxford, England, and preventing traffic accidents. Later Crispin Porter + Bogusky inserted a novelette, ‘‘Men of Metal,’’ into consumer magazines like National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Men’s Health, and Men’s Journal. The 40-page insert chronicled a journalist’s quest to find Dr. Mayhew and the people rescued by his robots. To perpetuate the joke, Crispin Porter + Bogusky created websites for Dr. Mayhew, along with a home page for Casson, the fictitious publishing company of ‘‘Men of Metal,’’ and a personal site for the novelette’s author. According to an interview with Jack Pitney, vice president of MINI USA, in the Wall Street Journal, customers appreciated the joke: ‘‘They like to come upon something in an interesting way and learn about it on their own terms.’’ One week after the appearance of ‘‘Men of Metal,’’ more than 46 million hits were registered on the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ main website. Success reached BMW’s bottom line as well. During the first year of ‘‘MINI Robots,’’ 36,000 MINIS were sold, surpassing the 34,000 units sold the previous year. By the end of 2004 MINI orders were outstripping supply, with a six-month waiting list for cars with some of the newer features.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Prompted by the Suez fuel crisis, Sir Alec Issigonis designed the Mini in 1959 to be Britain’s first ‘‘classless’’ car. Meager but efficient, the tiny Mini was sold in the United States for only seven years, until collapsible steering wheels were mandated in 1967. In 1994 BMW acquired the Rover Group, which included the Mini brand. The German automakers initially were unsure about how to reawaken interest in the car, especially in the United States. Even after engineers had modernized the interior, upgraded the MINI with a 115-hp Chrysler engine, and increased the length by 20 inches, it was still the smallest car in the U.S. market. By 2001 consumer trends, including the burgeoning markets for SUVs and full-size trucks, suggested a daunting forecast for the MINI. ‘‘If we’d listened to the market research, we’d have never done the MINI,’’ Pitney admitted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky oversaw the U.S. marketing launch for the MINI. At the start of 2002 the budget was a meager $15 million, with Crispin Porter + Bogusky introducing cost-effective magazine and outdoor advertisements that Brandweek called a series of ‘‘one-offs,’’ individual ads that were not part of an integrated campaign. Playboy allowed MINI to ‘‘pose’’ for its June 2002 centerfold spread, complete with a list of likes and dislikes. ‘‘The end to a perfect day: A hand-washing with warm, sudsy water and a nice wax,’’ the ad read. In 2003 MINI punch-out kits, which allowed people to construct their own paper models, could be found in consumer magazines. Ford Expeditions were driven across the United States with MINIs strapped to their roofs. ‘‘We have to be creative in our marketing and look for clever ways to have $1 seem like $2,’’ Pitney told Autoweek. ‘‘Everything we do has to reflect the unique, fun, cheeky nature of the MINI brand in a holistic, 360-degree MINI way.’’
From 2001 to 2003 brand recognition for the MINI rose more than 400 percent in the United States. Despite consumers’ inclination toward larger cars, MINI sales rose from 20,000 units in 2002 to more than 34,000 in 2003. Kerri Martin, manager for marketing communications at MINI USA, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, ‘‘We’re constantly going left when everyone is going right.’’ It was in this vein of unorthodox thinking that the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ campaign was created.

TARGET MARKET
MINI USA and Crispin Porter + Bogusky anticipated that ‘‘MINI Robots’’ would resonate with the 20- to 30-year-old demographic of mechanically minded males who were put off by women’s praise of the car as ‘‘cute.’’ This was also a group, as Pitney told the Wall Street Journal, that does not like ‘‘being hit in the face with traditional advertising.’’
In an interview with Shoot, Andrew Keller, a Crispin Porter + Bogusky creative director, said, ‘‘[Given] the nature of the car, its target audience is what I call a creative mindset. They are people that go to the Web, and believe the car is a means of self-expression—it is that sort of vibe. However, we had to zero in on a target at the beginning, and it is twenty- to thirty-year-old males.’’ He added, ‘‘But that is more tactical than anything right now because ultimately, the MINI should be something that everybody wants. The queen drove one and a plumber can drive one, and that is what we want to maintain.’’
Although a variety of men’s magazines featured the novelette ‘‘Men of Metal,’’ the references to the story were placed on the Internet. Thus, passing over a lower-income audience, ‘‘MINI Robots’’ was aimed at a target market with access to a computer and an Internet connection.

THE ITALIAN JOB
BMW’s MINI made cameo appearances in movies like Bourne Identity and Austin Powers, Goldmember, but the little car’s biggest role was in the 2003 remake of The Italian Job. While British Motor Corporation had refused to supply cars for the 1969 version, with Michael Caine, BMW donated more than 30 MINIs for Paramount’s remake.

COMPETITION
J.D. Power and Associates stated in 2002 that MINI USA had not only reintroduced the brand in the United States but also created a new automotive sector, the premium small car. Other critics found categorizing the MINI more difficult and usually compared it to Volkswagen’s New Beetle or to Toyota’s Scion. The New Beetle was introduced in 1998 with the tagline ‘‘Drivers Wanted,’’ which was similar to MINI’s ‘‘Let’s Motor.’’ Volkswagen’s ad agency, Arnold Communications, initially catered to nostalgic baby boomers, with copy declaring ‘‘Less flower. More Power’’ or ‘‘If you sold your soul in the ‘80s, here’s your chance to buy it back.’’ After its launch in 1998 demand for the New Beetle skyrocketed, and according to the Financial Times, by October 1998 Volkswagen had sold 64,000 units. By 2003, however, sales of the New Beetle had slowed drastically, and between 2001 and 2002 Volkswagen reduced production by 18 percent. ‘‘Volkswagen’s New Beetle and Chrysler’s PT Cruiser . . . often prove to be ‘fashion statements’ with relatively quick boom-and-bust cycles,’’ wrote Paul Eisenstein in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
According to Forbes magazine, Toyota introduced the Scion in 2004 with substantial success. In its first year sales of the Scion matched those of the MINI. Compared to the MINI, however, Scion explicitly targeted a younger market, Generation Y, those born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. In 2004 Toyota spent 70 percent of its Scion marketing budget on lifestyle events, including nightclubs and small-venue concerts. Scion even allowed consumers to accessorize the car over the Internet before stepping foot on a lot. Jim Farley, vice president of Scion, told Ward’s Dealer Business that more than 50 percent of Scion customers had configured their vehicles online, adding an average of $1,200 in accessories.

MARKETING STRATEGY
According to an interview with Martin in the New York Times, the planning for the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ campaign began in late 2002 after Crispin Porter + Bogusky had requested a comic book or novel about robots. The campaign was developed over the following 18 months and launched in March 2004. ‘‘[The campaign] started as, ‘Hey, let’s build robots out of car parts,’ ’’ said Alex Bogusky, partner and executive creative director of the agency. It slowly morphed into a detailed campaign in the belief that, ‘‘if people are involved with it, they spend a lot of time with it, a good 45 minutes to an hour.’’ Beam, an outside company, assisted Crispin Porter + Bogusky with the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ main website, http:// www.r50rd.co.uk. Zoic Studios supplied the video clips depicting Dr. Mayhew’s daily experiments, including colossal MINI robots reaching down to grab SUVs before they plowed into test walls. Four additional websites were created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The first was a website for the fictional journalist Rowland Samuel. The second, for Samuel’s fictitious publishing company, Casson, depicted mock upcoming releases about Bigfoot, Loch Ness, and alien crop circles. The last two were Geocities websites, on Yahoo, including a personal website for Dr. Mayhew and one posting the latest MINI robot sightings around Oxford. After the websites were up, the 40-page insert ‘‘Men of Metal: Eyewitness Accounts of Humanoid Robots’’ appeared in such consumer magazines as Motor Trend, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. The insert was written by the fictional Samuel, a freelance writer who bumped into an acquaintance at an Oxford party. The two began one-upping each other with urban legends, until Samuel’s acquaintance claimed a friend had photographed a giant robot that saved a car from hydroplaning. Enticed by the story, Samuel probed others connected to the photograph in order to prove or disprove the story. Using testimonials and photos as evidence, ‘‘Men of Metal’’ duped a significant portion of its readers.
Ambiguity fueled the buzz over ‘‘MINI Robots.’’ For the first two months of the campaign MINI logos and branding were omitted from the websites and the novelette. ‘‘We wanted people to experience it without us making a big announcement,’’ Bogusky told the New York Times. The robots were not demystified until April, when Crispin Porter + Bogusky put up posters throughout New York City and Los Angeles featuring the MINI logo above the robot images. A ‘‘Robots’’ option appeared as well on the drop-down menu of the MINI USA website, allowing visitors to accessorize the robots with MINI-like features. Though ‘‘some people will be disappointed’’ after discovering the truth behind the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ campaign, Bogusky told the New York Times, ‘‘most people appreciate you doing something different.’’

THE BEATLES DROVE MINIS
Despite selling a mere 10,000 units in the United States during the 1960s, Mini still managed to surface in the American psyche via celebrities. As Out Motoring stated, ‘‘It is always the 1960s for which it will be remembered . . . These 10 years saw the Mini go from a ‘housewives shopping car’ to a must have fashion accessory.’’ James Garner, Twiggy, the Beatles, Peter Sellers, and even Steve McQueen drove Minis.

OUTCOME
Public response to ‘‘MINI Robots’’ was almost immediate. Crispin Porter + Bogusky reported that a week after its introduction the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ main website had received more than 46 million hits. By October 2004 it had attracted more than 1 million visitors. MINI USA received E-mails from people who said that they enjoyed the campaign so much they were going to a dealer. MINI seemed to be avoiding the boom-and-bust pitfalls that had haunted the New Beetle and the PT Cruiser. BMW projected selling only 25,000 MINIs in 2002–04, the first three years of its reintroduction in the United States, but in the first year alone more than 20,000 units were sold. This increased to 34,000 in 2003 and 36,000 in 2004, by which time the MINI was making up 11 percent of BMW’s total sales. In 2004 sales of the MINI were still outstripping the supply, with a six-month waiting list for cars with certain features. Bogusky boasted about the success of ‘‘MINI Robots’’ to the New York Times: ‘‘I’ve never gotten e-mails about a billboard or a television commercial saying, ‘I’m going to buy a car because of this.’ Here, we’ve gotten several.’’
Many industry critics, as well as Crispin Porter + Bogusky and MINI USA, believed that the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ campaign had created a new model in the advertising industry. For example, other viral marketing campaigns appeared in 2004. To market its liquid-crystal Aquos television, Sharp disseminated rumors that $3 million was stashed in hidden urns that could be located by using its website. For Lee Jeans, Fallow created a blog and answering-machine message supposedly left by a 90-foot model. ‘‘MINI Robots,’’ along with Sega’s ‘‘Beta-7’’ campaign, created a paradigm that treated consumers as willing participants, not passive observers. ‘‘We’re going from the Golden Age of advertising to the Information Age of advertising,’’ Bogusky told Advertising Age’s Creativity. ‘‘And it’s not going to be as easy for this generation to judge the brilliance of this new age.’’

COUNTERFEIT CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
After the United States mandated collapsible steering wheels in 1967, the British Mini Cooper retreated back to the United Kingdom and was not sold stateside for 35 years. Reintroduced in 2002 after being purchased and then reengineered by Bayerische Motoren-Werke AG (BMW), the MINI Cooper, as it was later capitalized, began a long series of unorthodox advertising campaigns. Whether it was being strapped to the roofs of SUVs or parked in the bleachers of sports venues, the car rapidly gained traction within the premium-small-car sector. While Volkswagen AG’s New Beetle and DaimlerChrysler AG’s PT Cruiser sales suffered in 2005, the MINI Cooper flourished under the brand’s ‘‘Let’s Motor’’ tagline. Hoping to not only to entertain consumers but also to immerse them deeper within the MINI Cooper brand, BMW released its ‘‘Counterfeit’’ campaign on February 14, 2005.
With an estimated budget of $25 million, the advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky launched ‘‘Counterfeit’’ across television, DVD, Internet, and print mediums. Airing only on cable networks, the campaign’s one TV commercial warned viewers of fictional counterfeiters who were supposedly selling counterfeit MINI Coopers on the black market. The commercial directed viewers to www.CounterfeitMini.org, a website created by the Counter Counterfeit Commission (CCC), an equally fictional watchdog organization that educated consumers about MINI Cooper counterfeits. If website visitors wanted to learn more, they could order a DVD containing the 10-minute spoof ‘‘Counterfeit MINI Cooper,’’ which absurdly documented con artists converting junk cars into look-alike MINI Coopers. For March 2005, MINI Cooper posted its highest sales month ever and surpassed the previous March by 44 percent. At the Cannes International Advertising Festival in 2005 the campaign garnered a Gold Lion as well as the only American-won Titanium Lion. The ceremony awarded four Titanium Lions to work that the judges considered to be innovative and that utilized several mediums.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Even though the British Mini Cooper was an extremely popular car throughout the United Kingdom, its American stint ended in 1967 after collapsible steering wheels were required on every new car sold. Sales of the Mini increasingly dropped after its 1960s heyday. Eventually the Mini brand and other British automobiles were managed by the Rover Group, which was purchased by BMW in 1994. At first BMWwas unsure of how to reintroduce the tiny car to the United States. Even after engineers modernized the interior, upgraded the car with a 115-hp Chrysler engine, and increased the length by 20 inches, it was still the smallest car in the U.S. market. By 2001 consumer trends, including the burgeoning markets for SUVs and full-size trucks, suggested a daunting forecast for theMINI Cooper. ‘‘If we’d listened to the market research, we’d have never done the MINI Cooper,’’ Jack Pitney, general manager of Mini USA, admitted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In 2002 Crispin Porter + Bogusky released what was the first of many innovative advertisements for the MINI Cooper. To promote the car’s recreational qualities, MINI Coopers were welded onto the roofs of SUVs and driven cross-country. Crispin Porter + Bogusky parked MINI Coopers in the seating sections of sporting arenas. Supermarket tabloids warned about ‘‘mutant bat boy in MINI Cooper.’’ Playboy magazine allowed a MINI Cooper to be featured as a centerfold in 2002. Worldwide sales for the MINI Cooper S skyrocketed 46 percent in 2003. As part of the ‘‘MINI Robots’’ campaign, in 2004 a booklet was inserted into consumer magazines such as Motor Trend, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. The booklets were written by the fictional Roland Samuel, a journalist validating stories about robots made from MINI Cooper parts that prevented traffic accidents in Oxford, England. Hoping to continue its string of innovative campaigns, creatives at Crispin Porter + Bogusky wanted to create a 2005 campaign with a ‘‘call to action,’’ or advertising that motivated consumers to look someplace else for brand information. The ad agency reasoned that the more time a consumer invested with a brand, the more likely it was that he or she would tell others about it.

TARGET MARKET
‘‘Counterfeit’’ targeted men 18 to 34 years old. The campaign’s 60-second commercial did not air on network television, where advertising cost more, but rather across cable channels popular with men, such as ESPN, MTV, and Spike TV. ‘‘Cable offers many more opportunities than the broadcast TV networks, at lower prices,’’ Jim Poh, media director of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, told Automotive News. ‘‘Cable is going to be a more effective use of your dollars. In a nutshell, the viewers of these channels have the MINI mindset.’’ One requirement for the ‘‘MINI mindset’’ was a sense of humor. The campaign’s TV commercial, along with the website to which it directed viewers, www.CounterfeitMINI.org, facetiously showed junk cars painted to resemble MINI Coopers. ‘‘Mini customers appreciate the joke. They are a group that doesn’t like being hit in the face with traditional advertising,’’ Pitney told the Wall Street Journal. ‘‘They are very much into discovery. They like to come upon something in an interesting way and learn about it on their own terms.’’

COMPETITION
Volkswagen’s Golf GTI and New Beetle were considered ‘‘premium small cars,’’ the classification of high-quality, high-priced, petite cars like the MINI Cooper. To promote the 2005 Golf GTI, the ad agency DDB created a television spot that used computers to juxtapose actor Gene Kelly’s face onto the body of a break-dancer. At the spot’s beginning it appeared that Kelly was standing on the rainy street corner from his 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain. After a few notes from the movie’s title song, the music escalated into an electronic-music rendition of ‘‘Singin’ in the Rain’’ while Kelly began break-dancing. At the commercial’s finale he appeared next to a parked Golf GTI.
Explaining why DDB used Kelly’s likeness for the spot, Martin Loraine, the creative director at the agency, told the New Zealand Herald, ‘‘We looked for things which were icons. We thought about the Golf GTI when it came out. There are not many cars that invent a genre, which is what we thought was the most prominent thing about the GTI. It wasn’t just a fast car or a nice car, it was an original, which is rare.’’
Starting in 1998 Arnold Worldwide advertised Volkswagen’s New Beetle with its ‘‘Drivers Wanted’’ campaign. Television spots initially targeted nostalgic baby boomers with copy declaring ‘‘Less Flower. More Power’’ or ‘‘If you sold your soul in the ‘80s, here’s your chance to buy it back.’’ At first the New Beetle’s popularity skyrocketed. More than 64,000 units were sold during its first year. By 2003, however, New Beetle sales began waning; critics referenced Volkswagen’s problems to the quick boom-and-bust cycle that had haunted Chrysler’s PT Cruiser after its 2000 release. In 2005 Volkswagen ended its contract with Arnold Worldwide and awarded its $400 million advertising account to Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

MARKETING STRATEGY
The ‘‘Counterfeit’’ campaign displayed MINI Cooper’s signature characteristics, such as the car’s colorful graphics and performance capabilities, in a way that ‘‘entertains and engages people,’’ Alex Bogusky, Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s principal, told Adweek. ‘‘You can’t just push things into enough eyeballs anymore,’’ he said. ‘‘It has to be so much fun that it’s worth their time, that you’ve entertained them and taught them about the product at the same time.’’
On February 14, 2005, a 60-second commercial began appearing across cable channels such as Spike TV, Speed Channel, Sci-Fi Channel, and Outdoor Life Network. The spot posed as a public-service announcement from the fictional Counter Counterfeit Commission (CCC). The CCC was supposedly alerting the public about a recent outbreak of counterfeit MINI Coopers. The spot first explained the counterfeiting of luxury watches, sunglasses, and most recently, MINI Coopers. Footage showed high-end watch and sunglass knockoffs in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro flea markets, followed by a dilapidated car that was decaled with racing stripes. The spot then announced the availability of a 10-minute DVD that educated consumers about fake MINI Coopers and included testimonials from previously defrauded consumers. A man with his face obscured and voice altered admitted, ‘‘I bought a MINI for $1,200 bucks. ‘Let’s Motor,’ right?’’ To which the voice-over answered, ‘‘Wrong!’’ The commercial continued with additional humorous footage of counterfeit MINI Coopers, followed by beautiful images of the real thing. The commercial ended with voiceover explaining, ‘‘To order Counterfeit MINIs, visit CounterfeitMINI.org or send a self-addressed-stampedenvelop to the Counter Counterfeit Commission.’’ The DVD, which sold for $19.95, provided more tongue-in-cheek information about counterfeit MINI Coopers. Besides the campaign’s main website, www.CounterfeitMini.org, which provided detailed informational about counterfeit and authentic MINI Coopers, another website was created that supposedly auctioned counterfeit MINI Coopers. Conveniently, the auctions had all been closed. Bryan Buckley directed the campaign’s filming in Rio de Janeiro. The footage was later edited to compose the 60-second television spot, the DVD, and the additional footage that was posted on the website. Collectively, it offered ‘‘an hour’s entertainment, maybe, and that’s a good trade for your time and your attention,’’ Bogusky told the Wall Street Journal. To further validate the CCC’s warnings, a pop-up message on www.MINIUSA.com directed consumers to call the CCC hotline if counterfeit MINI Coopers were spotted. Fictional brochures were also inserted in consumer magazines to warn about counterfeit MINI Coopers.
One of the campaign’s challenges was its limited $25 million budget. To compete against Volkswagen, which spent an estimated $400 million on advertising in 2005, Crispin Porter + Bogusky devised a campaign outside of traditional formats. ‘‘Given that there is not a lot of difference among products in any given category, advertising is the differentiator,’’ Chuck Porter, chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, told Television Week. ‘‘We believe that making a brand a part of pop culture [is more effective].’’
Some analysts criticized the campaign’s deceptive quality, which could leave its target audience feeling betrayed. Also, for consumers to experience the full breadth of the campaign, they needed to visit the website, an extra step that complicated the campaign’s message. Many advertising agencies, fearful of the strategy’s overall risk, avoided such ‘‘call to action’’ campaigns. Tim Mellors, who had executed ‘‘call to action’’ campaigns as chief creative officer of WPP Group’s Grey Worldwide North America, explained the benefit of this strategy to the Wall Street Journal: ‘‘You know perfectly well that most people won’t bother, but when you get it right, it’s another stage of involvement that’s never been there in the past.’’

TOUGH LOVE
For the MINI Cooper ‘‘Counterfeit’’ campaign the advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky created a spoof website titled www.CounterfeitMini.org. The site supposedly warned consumers about counterfeit MINI Coopers flooding the car market. In one section of the website, titled ‘‘TOUGH LOVE,’’ a visitor could use his or her mouse to slap a counterfeit MINI Cooper owner who had supposedly bought an antique car, fashioned with MINI Cooper fog lamps and racing stripes, thinking it was a MINI Cooper.

OUTCOME
The ‘‘Counterfeit’’ campaign yielded success soon after its launch. In March 2005 MINI Cooper recorded its highest monthly sales posting ever and surpassed the previous March’s earnings by 44 percent. Fairing well at award shows, the campaign won a Gold Lion Award at the Cannes International Advertising Festival in 2005 and also received a Titanium Lion. The latter was given to the four campaigns considered most effective at using multiple mediums. ‘‘Counterfeit’’ was the only American campaign to win a Titanium Lion in 2005.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky also noticed a surge of chatter in automotive blogs and MINI Cooper chat rooms regarding the ‘‘Counterfeit’’ ads. Alex Bogusky, serving as a guest writer for Advertising Age’s Creativity, stated, ‘‘I’m very happy to see the MINI ‘Counterfeit’ work getting recognized. It was a massive undertaking and a labor of joy for so many people at the agency, and it’s the kind of work that gives us personally the greatest joy because the interaction with consumers, from the TV to the web, is so fun to watch. You actually get to see and read e-mails and blog entries from people who are being persuaded and entertained by MINI and the MINI brand. The relationship between brand and consumer is created so transparently and quickly, it’s almost like creating advertising live on stage.’’

IN YOUR HOME CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
The Basketball Club of Seattle, LLC, owners of both the National Basketball Association’s Seattle SuperSonics and the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Seattle Storm, had seen the Sonics through several successful seasons in the 1990s, but the organization wanted to prepare for a future that would doubtless include down years. Increasing fan loyalty, the franchise believed, was the only way to guarantee ticket sales and TV viewership during losing seasons as well as winning seasons. The team’s front office set out to achieve this through a combination of enhanced free TV offerings and marketing. After moving Sonics games from pay-per-view TV to local TV stations preparatory to the 1997–98 season, the team’s executives charged Seattle advertising agency WongDoody with the task of publicizing the new schedule of TV broadcasts in a way that would strengthen the bond between fans and their team. WongDoody, allotted less than $500,000 for the entire campaign, arrived at the concept of sending actual Sonics stars on unannounced visits to the homes of ordinary Seattle residents. The idea gave the campaign its tagline, ‘‘In Your Home,’’ which made direct reference to the newly expanded TV schedule for the team’s games. The depiction of Sonics players interacting with ordinary Seattle residents also served the important purpose of humanizing the stars, which was particularly important given the fan cynicism of the time, a result of negative stereotypes then abounding about overpaid, misbehaving, out-of-touch players. For the first two weeks after its fall 1997 release, the campaign was aired heavily on regional stations during high-profile prime-time programming; it then continued on the local stations with which the team had partnered for the new game-broadcasting arrangement.
‘‘In Your Home’’ was a success, achieving goals of increasing both TV ratings and interest in the team among Seattle residents. It also became one of the most awarded regional campaigns as well as one of the most awarded sports campaigns of its time, winning top honors at almost every major advertising festival. The campaign was extended for the 1998–99 basketball season, though it was updated to show players in public locations like grocery stores and bowling alleys rather than in residents’ homes.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Seattle SuperSonics entered the NBA in 1967. Like many expansion teams (teams new to a professional sports league), the franchise struggled in its first few years of existence, not posting a winning record until its fifth full season of play. The late 1970s, however, saw the Sonics become one of the league’s best teams; it reached the NBA finals at the end of the 1977–78 season and won the league championship in 1978–79. After experiencing winning seasons in the early 1980s the team slumped in the middle part of the decade. Though the Sonics rallied in the late 1980s, the team did not become a consistent winner again until the 1990s. After bringing in George Karl as head coach in 1992, the Sonics averaged 60 wins a season (out of a total of 82 regular season games) for six seasons in a row. They did not win a championship during this time, but they became one of the most elite franchises in the NBA.
The Sonics, accordingly, had little trouble generating fan loyalty in Seattle. In fact, home games almost always sold out. The team’s front office, however, was looking to the franchise’s future and knew that the Sonics would not always be able to count on a winning record to sell seats and generate revenue. Only fan loyalty could guarantee a healthy franchise.
Nurturing fan loyalty in the NBA of the late 1990s was a more difficult task than in previous eras. The gulf between fans and players had never been so wide; this was a result of the rise of free agency, which empowered players but did not encourage them to be loyal to their teams, and the corresponding phenomenon of exponentially increasing salaries. Occasional but highly publicized scandalous behavior on the part of players—such as Latrell Sprewell of the Golden State Warriors choking his coach, P.J. Carlesimo—further fueled the disconnect between fans and players, and rising ticket prices meant that many of the die-hard NBA fans of the past could no longer see their teams in person. Though a winning team could overcome the widespread fan cynicism of the time, the perception that players were only interested in money and inhabited a distant, impossibly privileged world was common among fans in all NBA markets.

TARGET MARKET
‘‘In Your Home’’ targeted exactly these formerly die-hard but now disenchanted NBA fans, many of whom could not afford to attend games in person. While such people tended to be more aware of the problems with the NBA than casual fans, they were also more likely to become enthusiastic about their team and the league if the right conditions were in place. These fans were typically males between the ages of 25 and 54.
The Sonics’ larger strategy of bringing such fans back into the fold included, crucially, a change in policy regarding the local TV broadcasting of the team’s games. In previous years, games had been broadcast primarily on pay-pay-view television—a situation that did not encourage those disenchanted with high ticket prices to tune in or feel loyalty toward the team—and ratings had been in decline for years. The 1997–98 season saw Sonics management address this issue to fans’ benefit, reaching a new agreement with the three major local networks in Seattle that called for a substantially increased network-TV schedule. Of the 82 regular-season Sonics games in the 1997–98 season, 56 would be televised on local network stations. Fans whose loyalty had been tested by changes in the NBA would now be granted comprehensive access to the team, free of charge.
WongDoody thus had a concrete basis upon which to build the message that the Sonics were an integral part of the Seattle community. The idea of the Sonics being ‘‘In Your Home’’ arose directly from the new broadcasting arrangement, taking the premise to a logical extreme: players were shown arriving at the homes of ordinary Seattle residents. Not only did this concept provide a natural way of publicizing the new 56-game TV schedule, but by also showing individual players interacting with ordinary people, it suggested that the gap between players and fans was not as distinct as many fans feared.

THE FOLLOW-UP
After the monumental success of ‘‘In Your Home,’’ which ran during the 1997–98 season, ad agency WongDoody’s client, the Seattle SuperSonics, had no interest in changing marketing tactics for the 1998–99 season. This presented WongDoody with a new creative challenge. The initial year’s spots had made such a splash partly because of the novelty of seeing Sonics stars showing up unannounced at people’s homes. Having achieved such notoriety, however, the campaign could not possibly catch viewers off-guard through simply extending this concept. WongDoody thus opted to satisfy its client’s demands for more of the same by showing Sonics players in other ordinary places: Gary Payton was shown shopping for groceries, Vin Baker was pictured bowling, and Olden Polynice was shown doing his laundry at a Laundromat. The campaign was well regarded, but it achieved nowhere near the acclaim of its predecessor. Rarely had a follow-up to a hugely acclaimed advertising campaign done so.

COMPETITION
Though no NBA team produced a campaign as highly regarded as ‘‘In Your Home’’ during the 1990s or early 2000s, the Sonics were not the first franchise to build its marketing on the idea of humanizing its star players. A successful campaign touting the Indiana Pacers, for instance, began during the 1994–95 season. Attempting to leverage success on the court—the Pacers had posted their first promising season in recent memory only a year earlier, in 1993–94 –into ticket sales and enduring fan loyalty, the franchise decided to focus on player personalities. One TV spot introduced the ‘‘many faces of Dale Davis,’’ an impassive Pacers forward who, the punch line went, showed one face to the camera despite the multiple scenarios posited in the voice-over. Another spot showed guard Reggie Miller addressing his abrasive on-the-court demeanor by arguing that he was misunderstood. Over the next two years full-season ticket sales for Pacers games grew by 25 percent, half-season sales grew by 69 percent, and 10-game ticket packages rose by 181 percent.
The Orlando Magic attempted to generate increased ticket sales via different means in a 2000–01 marketing campaign, and in the process the team’s executives found a way to measure the success of emerging advertising platforms. After acquiring exciting players, including one of the league’s star forwards, Grant Hill, as well as young players Tracy McGrady and Mike Miller, the team expected a bump in ticket sales. The franchise’s front office attempted to generate further interest in the 2000–01 season by advertising a contest offering fans a chance to play one-on-one with Hill. Advertisements ran online and on radio and television, and those who entered the contest received a brochure promoting season-ticket sales. Half of the season-ticket brochures were sent via E-mail and half via regular mail. Season-ticket sales well outpaced those in previous years, and the Magic found that 16 percent of fans who received E-mailed brochures bought season tickets, compared with 1.5 percent of those who received print brochures.

MARKETING STRATEGY
The concept of showing real Sonics stars showing up unannounced at the homes of real Seattle residents accomplished the campaign’s two primary goals at once: it humorously dramatized the news of the Sonics’ increased TV presence, and it demonstrated that Sonics players, far from being prima donnas, were ordinary people when they were away from the court. To emphasize ‘‘real’’ behavior, the spots were unscripted, and the ordinary people whose residences the Sonics players visited were not given advance warning. This resulted in a narrative situation reminiscent of the well-known ‘‘Publishers Clearing House’’ commercials, in which the surprise of the individuals featured in the spots formed a major part of the story. The players’ interactions with their hosts developed over time as they engaged in numerous and varied ‘‘ordinary’’ activities with the families and groups that they visited.
For instance, Sonics guard Gary Payton was shown entering the common room of a nursing home, to the delight and applause of residents. He was then pictured reacting to comments such as ‘‘I always thought you were awfully thin,’’ learning how to knit, and taking a lead role in a heated game of Monopoly. Guard Nate McMillan, meanwhile, arrived unannounced at a suburban Tupperware party populated exclusively by middleaged women; after the expected interval of surprised exclamations, he settled into the sofa and participated in the party. McMillan innocently wisecracked his way through the lead Tupperware promoter’s spiel before being caught off-guard by a post-party question, ‘‘And you play quarterback, right?’’ Forward/center Sam Perkins showed up at the home of a family of five, whose three young boys immediately began monopolizing his attention. Perkins roughhoused with them around their backyard basketball goal, played video games with the smallest son sitting in his lap, and engaged in a pillow fight with them just before bedtime. Each of the commercials opened with text reading, ‘‘The Sonics are coming to your home.’’ At the end of the player-fan interactions, on-screen text stated, ‘‘See them in your home,’’ and then text appeared reading, ‘‘56 games on free TV.’’
WongDoody was allotted a relatively small budget of just under $500,000, though this was a workable amount of money given that regionally placed TV spots cost only a fraction of national placements on the same programs. WongDoody still sought to get the most possible mileage out of its budget by opening the campaign on prominent prime-time shows. The campaign broke during ABC’s Monday Night Football, and for the first two weeks after its launch it ran in heavy rotation on such high-profile programs as Seinfeld and Friends, in addition to cable destinations popular with the male target, such as ESPN and Fox Sports Net. Additionally, WongDoody media planners negotiated airtime with the local networks that would be airing the Sonics games. The agency likewise informed the news teams of the three leading local TV networks, all of which ran stories on the campaign. Print elements played a lesser role in the campaign. An initial three-page spread in regional editions of Sports Illustrated magazine’s NBA preview issue helped publicize the new TV schedule, and small-space newspaper ads carrying the ‘‘In Your Home’’ theme ran adjacent to prime-time TV listings.

OUTCOME
Research conducted at the end of the 1997–98 season indicated a 51 percent jump in viewership over the previous year’s pay-per-view numbers and judged community involvement with the Sonics to have substantially increased, especially compared with other NBA teams. Season-ticket renewals reached an all-time high. Harry Hutt, senior vice president of marketing for rival NBA team the Portland Trailblazers, called the ‘‘In Your Home’’ campaign ‘‘a brilliant example of what the right kind of campaign can do,’’ a judgment that was echoed by his own team’s adoption of a similar marketing concept a few years later.
‘‘In Your Home’’ became one of the most acclaimed professional-sports campaigns of its time as well as one of the most acclaimed regional campaigns. It won the GRANDY, the top award bestowed at the ANDY Awards, in 1998, as well as both the Grand Prize (top prize among all campaigns) and the prize for best lowbudget campaign at the 1998 London International Advertising Awards. It won four Clios that year, a Gold Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, and a Gold EFFIE. USA Today placed the campaign among its top ads of the year, and Adweek included it in its ‘‘Best Ads of the ‘90s’’ list.
The overwhelming success of the campaign posed only one difficulty for the Sonics and WongDoody: the challenge of following up such a successful campaign the next year. After some debate, ‘‘In Your Home’’ was extended with a twist. Rather than showing Sonics players arriving unannounced at people’s homes, the 1998–99 campaign placed the players in everyday locations, such as bowling alleys, grocery stores, and Laundromats.

NEW SCHOOL CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
Barclays Global Investors (BGI), a subsidiary of the United Kingdom’s Barclays PLC, was a little-known mutual-fund provider in the United States when in 1999 it developed a new investment product called iShares. It was essentially an index mutual fund that could be bought and sold like shares of stock. Such funds held shares of stock in every company listed on a particular index in order to enjoy the growth of the entire group, the winners more than offsetting the losers. It was not imaginative investing, but over time it proved to be a worthwhile strategy. Making the index funds tradable was an innovation, but given the abundance of mutual funds competing for investment dollars and BGI’s limited marketing budget, it was difficult to bring iShares to the attention of investors. In 2004 BGI released the ‘‘New School’’ campaign, which targeted the top ranks of investment advisers rather than the general investing public.
The ‘‘New School’’ campaign consisted mostly of television spots and print ads. Airtime was limited to the high-profile financial cable channels CNBC and Bloomberg. Print ads were run in prestigious publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. The less-than-$5 million campaign ran from January 2004 through August 2004. The target of the advertising was younger financial advisers who were willing to entertain new ideas in investment. Many of the television spots depicted a financial adviser who, having decided he was ready to embrace a ‘‘new school’’ of thought and action, debated his mirror image, who was stuck in the past.
The ‘‘New School’’ campaign significantly improved awareness of iShares among financial advisers and greatly increased investments in iShares. During the course of the campaign, Barclays became the third-best-selling fund family. The campaign also won a pair of prestigious awards: a Midas and an EFFIE.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
BGI’s U.S. predecessor, a Wells Fargo Bank unit, was a pioneer of the index fund—a mutual fund that mirrored a market index such as the S&P 500 (a list of the top 500 U.S. corporations ranked by their stock value). By holding shares in all companies of an index in proportion to their worth, an index fund achieved the same growth as the entire index. It was a passive form of investing but produced steady results and became a popular investment vehicle. In 1999 BGI unveiled a new index-investment product, iShares, but instead of taking the form of a mutual fund iShares were exchange-traded funds, which could be bought or sold just like shares of stock, even though they represented a large bundle of stocks. In addition to containing stocks, iShares funds would also be developed to collect baskets of bonds, currencies, and commodities.
BGI began marketing iShares in 2000 with a $10 million campaign developed by the ad agency Saatachi & Saatchi, San Francisco; it focused on wealthier, more sophisticated investors, taking what Adweek magazine’s Justin M. Norton called a ‘‘buttoned-down approach.’’ As BGI struggled to establish iShares in the marketplace, Saatchi closed its San Francisco office, and BGI’s advertising account was put up for review. In a surprise outcome, a new advertising agency, Venables, Bell & Partners, founded by veterans of San Francisco’s wellregarded Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, won the business. The new agency took a more lighthearted approach than its predecessor, focusing on the close relationship between investors and the financial advisers who handled their iShares account. In one of the television spots, for example, a man urged his adviser to don a helmet because of nearby construction projects, while in another spot a man mistook a car backfire for gunshots and reacted by knocking down and then shielding his adviser. The tagline was ‘‘Industrial Strength Investment Tools.’’ BGI was experiencing only modest success with iShares in the early 2000s, a result in large measure of the depressed state of the stock market. In 2003 Venables began looking for a new approach to promoting iShares. Because it lacked the hefty ad budgets of its competitors, BGI could not hope to target the general investing public. Instead Venables and BGI decided to target financial advisers. Agency personnel spent a month meeting with financial advisers to hone the new strategy. Out of this fieldwork emerged the ‘‘New School’’ campaign, which was released in 2004.

TARGET MARKET
The ‘‘New School’’ campaign was aimed at financial advisers, the people who could urge their clients to purchase iShares. Because of a limited advertising budget BGI narrowed its target to the top 200,000 financial advisers in the United States, who were responsible for placing the lion’s share of the investments made by wealthy Americans. But after devoting a month to meet with many of these advisers for lunch, dinner, or drinks, the marketers came to recognize a major difference between older and younger advisers. The former clung to tried-and-true recommendations, such as traditional mutual funds, while the younger group was more open to new ideas like iShares. It was this insight that laid a foundation for the ‘‘New School’’ campaign and led to the narrowing of the target audience to younger advisers—and to the older ones who would respond positively to the challenge of fresh thinking.

COMPETITION
BGI’s main competition for iShares came from mutual funds, especially the larger ones, such as those sold by the Vanguard Group, Fidelity Investments, and T. Rowe Price Group. Together they spent about $200 million on advertising each year, cast a wide net, and as a result had developed tremendous brand recognition. Fidelity itself spent nearly $100 million a year on ads, according to Adweek. While BGI was preparing its new marketing effort, Fidelity was pursuing its ‘‘Personally Invested’’ campaign, which targeted individual investors. Vanguard was spending another $40 to $50 million promoting its multitude of funds, and the marketing efforts of T. Rowe Price were estimated by Adweek to cost $35 million a year. With far less money at its disposal, BGI could not hope to compete directly with the major fund providers, hence the decision to focus on investment advisers rather than the general investing public. To further complicate the task, iShares also had to compete against scores of other fund providers, many of which—such as Dreyfuss, Oppenheimer, Janus, American Century, Franklin Templeton, and Nuveen—had been around for years and had built up their own level of brand recognition. In short, iShares faced a crowded marketplace, a situation that forced the narrow focus of the ‘‘New School’’ campaign.

DEEP ROOTS
Barclays Global Investors was originally a unit of the legendary Wells Fargo, founded in the early 1850s by Henry Wells and William Fargo, who had earlier established American Express. Wells Fargo was started in San Francisco to serve the stagecoach and banking needs created by the California gold rush, and as a sister company to American Express it handled the express shipping business west of the Mississippi River. What would become Barclays Global Investors was introduced in 1973 as Wells Fargo Investment Advisors. Barclays PLC acquired the operation in 1995 and merged it with other divisions to create Barclays Global Investors, which like its famous ancestor remained based in San Francisco.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Venables set three campaign objectives. The first was to gain notice for iShares in the marketplace. Second was to drive traffic to a website where interested parties could learn more about the new product by downloading articles and accessing other information. Finally, and most importantly, the campaign wanted to drive the sale of iShares.
To reach the target audience of upper-tier financial advisers, BGI and its agency Venables concentrated their resources on select television programming and print media, including cable TV channels CNBC and Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and Barron’s, and smaller trade publications. In addition, the campaign promoted iShares in direct mailings, through online and interactive advertising, via public relations, and at tradeshows. To gain the most impact from the campaign’s limited budget, television commercials were aired before and after stock-market trading hours. The campaign also involved tracking the Federal Open Market Committee Meetings, of which there were eight in 2004. At these meetings Alan Greenspan, chairman of as the Federal Reserve, announced the agency’s short-term monetary policy. Believing that financial advisers were certain to pay closer attention to the media whenever Greenspan was scheduled to make a pronouncement, Venables pursued a strategy of running daytime television spots at these times. The day after each meeting, when financial advisers were likely to be reading news coverage, BGI spent money on newspaper ads promoting iShares.
The ‘‘New School’’ television spots first began airing in early 2004. One, titled ‘‘Clean Slate,’’ showed a group of financial professionals trapped in a conference room by a flood. When the sun rose the next day, the spot offered the message: ‘‘Investment advisers: It’s a new day. The new school of investing is here. iShares.com/newschool.’’ Another set of commercials in the campaign featured text that read, ‘‘Say goodbye to the old you. Here’s to the new smarter you.’’ They included ‘‘Break Up,’’ in which trick photography was used to show a financial adviser on a lunch date with himself; he explained to his chagrined former self, ‘‘This just isn’t working for me . . . You’re holding me back. I’m moving our clients in new directions with new investment strategies.’’ In ‘‘Fired’’ a financial adviser called her double into her office to terminate her employment. Another spot, titled ‘‘Grave,’’ portrayed a man digging a burial plot for his old self, while his identical image stood by and attempted to talk the man out of leaving the old ways behind: ‘‘Are you sure you want to do this? We had a pretty good run. Making trades, picking stocks . . .’’ The man cheerfully replied, ‘‘I’m sure . . . Get in the hole.’’ Each spot ended with the tagline ‘‘iShares. This is the new school of investing.’’
The print ads of the ‘‘New School’’ campaign followed a similar approach to the television spots. In one ad a man stood on a sidewalk with a briefcase, a deflated version of himself at his feet, as if he had just shed his skin. In the corner appeared the text: ‘‘Eric White, Financial Adviser; 1965 born; 2005 evolved.’’ Ironically, or not, this was also the campaign’s target audience: white financial advisers around 40 years of age. Other print ads played up the simplicity of dealing in iShares. In one execution an adviser was shown drinking a cup of coffee, his feet propped up on his mahogany desk. In another a man in a cubicle environment was shown looking a little under the weather. The headline read:
‘‘Gentle Relief from Bond Ladder Discomfort Is Here.’’ (A bond ladder was an investment strategy in which bonds or certificate of deposits were arranged to mature simultaneously).

OUTCOME
The ‘‘New School’’ campaign was successful on a number of levels. It increased recognition of iShares in the marketplace. According to a 2003 tracking study, 57 percent of financial advisers were aware of iShares without given any aid, and awareness of iShares among financial advisers totaled 98 percent. The campaign also drove increased traffic to the iShares website. From January until September 2004, visits increased 74 percent over the comparable period in 2003. Finally, during the campaign period, January through August 2004, iShares enjoyed a surge in cash investments (inflows), a 280 percent increase over the same period of time in 2003. Inflows increased from $6.37 billion to more than $24.25 billion. As a result, iShares became the number three fund family according to cash inflows during this period. The ‘‘New School’’ campaign also garnered advertising-industry awards for Venables. It won a Silver EFFIE in the Small Budgets category of the 2005 EFFIE Awards, a prestigious competition produced by the New York American Marketing Association, a trade organization for marketing professionals. In addition, the spot ‘‘Clean Slate’’ won a 2005 Midas Award for best special effects. The Midas Awards, produced by New York Festivals, honored marketing work in financial services.

ART OF THE HEIST CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
The car maker Audi of America, Inc. (AoA), was the American arm of the German company Audi AG. The Michigan-based automaker’s advertising changed drastically in fall 2004 when Stephen Berkov took control as marketing director. The first vehicle launched under Berkov’s supervision was the new Audi A3, a luxury wagon that AoA planed to release in mid-2005. Berkov defined the A3’s target market as 25- to 34-year-old upper-income males. Aware that this target disliked mainstream advertisements, Berkov oversaw the release of an atypical campaign titled ‘‘Art of the Heist.’’ Created by the ad agency McKinney & Silver and the production firm Chelsea Pictures/Campfire, ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ employed audience participation via the Internet and outside events to shape the campaign’s narrative. Ad critics used the gaming phrase ‘‘alternatereality game’’ (ARG) to describe the campaign’s blend of reality, fiction, and audience participation. The $3 million to $4 million campaign began on March 31, 2005, three months before the A3 was available. The campaign first surfaced when an Audi A3 was reportedly ‘‘stolen’’ from the rotating display at the New York Auto Show. For the next three months McKinney & Silver used real events, along with integrated television, print, and online advertising, to tell the story of a thwarted art heist. The campaign’s narrative featured the characters Nisha Roberts and Ian Yarbrough driving across America in an Audi A3 while being chased by hit men. The ‘‘Heist’’ actors made public appearances at the popular Coachella Music Festival and on the music TV channel VH1. Television spots and magazine ads posed as real alerts about the stolen A3 until the campaign ended in late June 2005.
Advertising critics credited ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ with being the auto industry’s first ARG campaign. It garnered the Best in Show award at the 2005 MIXX Awards, an advertising-industry event sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Adweek magazine. In 2005 sales of A3s surpassed AoA’s original expectations. During May 2005 the automaker’s website also registered 30 percent more visitors than it had in the previous May.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Audi of America was the U.S. branch of Audi AG, 99 percent of which was owned by Volkswagen AG in 1999. AoA’s advertising shifted drastically when Stephen Berkov, who had previously headed advertising for the German-based Audi AG, was reassigned in 2004 as marketing director for AoA. To allocate more capital for advertising, the newly appointed director disbanded AoA’s e-business team and reduced spending on the company’s online infrastructure. Berkov also reduced AoA’s dependency on multiple ad agencies and allocated more control to McKinney & Silver, which had done work for the company since 1993. Referring to AoA’s advertising account, Berkov said to Advertising Age, ‘‘I wanted it integrated because it blurred the brand too much.’’
To advertise its all-new A4 model, in early 2005 AoA released its ‘‘Sum of All Parts Challenge’’ campaign. The campaign included the tagline ‘‘Never Follow,’’ a slogan used for all AoA models. ‘‘We said, ‘let’s break out of just doing banners,’’’ said Dave Cook, group creative director at McKinney & Silver to Adweek. ‘‘Let’s have people do something.’’ Resembling an online scavenger hunt, the ‘‘Sum of All Parts Challenge’’ asked consumers to collect nine different banner ads touting A4 features. Ads were placed on websites relating to finance, lifestyle, and automotive interests. The challenge’s winner was eligible for a two-year lease on a new A4. Other prizes included personal digital assistants (PDAs) and high-end stereos.
Even though the A3 would not be available until mid-2005, Berkov wanted to target 25- to 34-year-olds starting in March. He believed that traditional television spots and print ads would not appeal to the car’s target, who, he explained to Advertising Age, did not appreciate commercials ‘‘shouting at them, telling them what to buy. They smell artificial messaging and lack of authenticity.’’ Instead Berkov wanted McKinney & Silver to create a campaign that engaged consumers as an alternate-reality computer game would.

TARGET MARKET
The campaign targeted an audience of video-game enthusiasts, also called gamers, who enjoyed playing alternatereality games (ARGs) that blended fiction with reality and were ultimately controlled by the games’ designers, or ‘‘puppeteers.’’ This target market, which Berkov profiled in the News & Observer as 23- to 34-year-old males, typically disliked traditional advertising that told consumers what to purchase. Also, according to advertising analysts, gamers typically avoided pop-up Internet ads by installing pop-up blockers on their computers. Many skipped through television spots by using TiVo, a television accessory allowing audiences to fast-forward through commercial breaks. Instead of being told what to purchase, gamers preferred to discover products on their own. ‘‘Engaging consumers so they follow your brand is the new holy grail,’’ Brad Brinegar, the CEO of McKinney & Silver, was quoted in BusinessWeek Online.
Some marketing analysts titled this tech-savvy demographic as Generation C; the C abbreviated the word ‘‘creative.’’ Generation C, according to Trendwatching.com’s director Reinier Evers, created most of the content of Internet forums, online blogs, and virtual bulletin boards. McKinney & Silver thus used such sites to make contact with its target market, releasing important details about the ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ storyline on the campaign’s main website, LastResortRetrieval.com. Actors playing roles in the campaign even answered questions in Internet chat rooms. Subsequent fan sites materialized during ‘‘Art of the Heist,’’ and the campaigns’ outcome was debated in blogs and bulletin boards.
In an approach that was unusual for advertising campaigns, the target that the agency chose for the ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ represented a different demographic from the one that AoA executives believed would actually purchase the product advertised. The target market for the Audi A3 wagon, which carried a price tag of more than $26,000, was defined by Berkov in BusinessWeek Online as 25- to 34-year-old males that were collegeeducated and earned more than $125,000 annually. This group was somewhat older and typically more affluent than the 23- to 34-year-old gamers. Creatives at McKinney & Silver assumed that if enough trendsetting gamers approved of the ‘‘Art of the Heist,’’ their opinions would persuade the more-affluent A3 target market.

COMPETITION
In March 2005 Volkswagen of America (VWoA,) the American branch of the German automaker Volkswagen AG, released print ads, radio spots, television spots, and other events heralding its newly designed A5 Jetta, which was larger and more expensive than its predecessors. The campaign, titled ‘‘All Grown Up.
Sort Of,’’ was created by the agency Arnold Worldwide of Boston. It targeted 20-something consumers transitioning into adulthood. The campaign’s first commercial, ‘‘Airport,’’ featured a young businessman using his A5 Jetta to shuttle an older, conservative colleague from the airport. When the tense older executive turned on the Jetta’s radio to ‘‘check the scores,’’ the speakers blared loud rock music. The spot ended with the tagline ‘‘The

AUGUST’S AUDI
August Horch founded the car manufacturer Auto Union in 1932. The German-based company featured four models of cars, including a touring car called Audi, which was a Latin translation of the founder’s first name. The corporation later dropped the name ‘‘Auto Union’’ in favor of ‘‘Audi.’’
new Jetta. It’s all grown up. Sort of.’’ In addition, as part of the campaign Arnold representatives distributed wooden puzzles and coloring books depicting adults performing mundane tasks until their lives were enlivened by the new Jetta. The campaign also included a sixminute film titled The Check Up, which featured a man in his late 20s humorously being criticized for not behaving like an adult.
On February 14, 2005, the ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky released a campaign titled ‘‘Counterfeit’’ to increase awareness about the premium small car MINI Cooper, a brand owned by Bayerische Motoren-Werke AG (BMW). Similar to ‘‘Art of the Heist,’’ the ‘‘Counterfeit’’ campaign used a nontraditional narrative that blended fiction and realty. It featured one television spot that warned of ‘‘counterfeiters’’ selling dilapidated cars as MINI Coopers. In addition to the one commercial, Crispin Porter + Bogusky created a fictional watchdog organization to educate the public about counterfeit MINIs. The 10-minute DVD spoof ‘‘Counterfeit MINI Cooper’’ could also be purchased on the website www.CounterfeitMini.org.

MARKETING STRATEGY
The ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ began on March 31, 2005, when AoA announced that its brand-new Audi A3 had been stolen from the New York Auto Show. To reinforce the claim, McKinney & Silver distributed handbills in 10 cities that announced the missing Audi. The A3’s vehicle identification number (VIN) was listed on the handbills. People who spotted the car were asked to call a phone number or visit Audi’s website. From the website visitors were led to a fictitious company called Last Resort Retrieval, which supposedly retrieved stolen art from high-profile thieves. LastResortRetrieval.com served as the hub for the campaign’s narrative and introduced the characters Nisha Roberts and Ian Yarbrough. A ‘‘glitch’’ on the website offered a glimpse into Last Resort Retrieval’s private intranet, which was loaded with clues such as tapped phone calls, surveillance videos, and puzzles.
Ian and Nisha discovered that an art thief had stolen the A3 and that memory cards with information about an art heist were hidden inside the car. Ian retrieved the A3 from a New Jersey chop shop. The act spurred the original car’s thief and then the police to chase Ian from the East Coast to the West Coast. To lend further credibility to the story, phony ‘‘ads’’ announcing the services and contact information of Last Resort Retrieval were placed in issues of Wired, Esquire, and USA Today. ‘‘What was certainly surprising to us was the importance and impact of good, old-fashioned traditional media in helping make [‘Art of the Heist’] explode,’’ Lee Newman, the AoA account director at McKinney & Silver, said to Adweek. In May 2005 a television spot featured interior and exterior images of the new A3. To relate the commercial to the campaign’s narrative, copy appeared during the spot asking the public to report the missing Audi to audiusa.com. ‘‘It was like a chemistry experiment,’’ Newman continued. ‘‘Adding a little bit of this, a little of that—you really sort of get an explosion.’’
Public events were also announced on
LastResortRetrieval.com. The campaign changed unexpectedly for its creators after the website reported that Ian and Nisha were appearing on May 1 at the Coachella Valley Music Festival. When AoA’s tent was inundated with fans earlier than expected, Chelsea Pictures, which produced the online video for the campaign, was forced to suddenly change the script. ‘‘One of our [fictional] characters was killed as a result of that,’’ Jonathan Cude, group creative director at McKinney & Silver, said to the News & Observer.
Fortunately for AoA and its ad agency, fans following the campaign began creating websites that speculated about the game’s outcome. Even websites such as VWVortex.com, an automotive website, tracked the story. The campaign ended in late June at E3, a video game convention held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Attendees, unaware that they were observing a staged performance, watched Ian physically apprehend the art thief responsible for the A3 robbery.

AUDI VICTIMS NETWORK
In the 1980s an American Audi owner named Alice Weinstein claimed that a brake malfunction had caused her Audi 5000 to unexplainably accelerate. After suffering an injury from the reported malfunction, Weinstein sued AoA dealerships and created the Audi Victims Network. The CBS program 60 Minutes even reported on the incident, which eventually sent AoA sales into a downward spiral. Fortunately for AoA, the New York courts favored the AoA dealerships in a 1986 settlement.

OUTCOME
AoA partially assessed the campaign’s success by measuring traffic to AoA’s U.S. website and Audi AG’s international website. Total traffic for both sites in April 2005 was double the amount recorded during the same month in 2004. AoA estimated that 500,000 people followed the ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ storyline until its completion in June. The car company also reported that 33 percent of the website’s visitors further searched for extended A3 features, such as dealer locations and lease options; this was higher than the 25 percent who further researched AoA’s A4 model. The campaign was credited with preselling 500 A3s before they were even available in North America. ‘‘‘The Art of the Heist’ represents a true innovation in the way Audi connects with its target consumer,’’ Berkov was quoted in the PR Newswire news service. ‘‘The power of this program comes from our deep understanding of the A3 target audience,’’ Berkov continued.
Advertising critics praised ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ for being the first ARG campaign within the auto industry. It garnered the Best in Show award at the 2005 MIXX Awards, along with gold awards for online integration and product launch and a silver award within the wordof-mouth category. AoA and McKinney & Silver considered ‘‘Art of the Heist’’ a success when AoA posted 5,389 A3s sold at the year’s end, making 2005 one of AoA’s best years in its 73-year legacy.

PRIVACY MANAGER CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
The first campaign for Ameritech from its new advertising agency, Ammirati Lintas Puris of New York, was launched on October 6, 1997, in an attempt to move customers from simply recognizing the brand to preferring it over other telecommunications companies. The following year’s campaign took an even more aggressive stance, with the goal of creating ‘‘active preference’’ in consumers—in other words, that they not only prefer the Ameritech brand but actually switch to it from other brands or expand their existing Ameritech services. The company provided firepower for such an ambitious goal. In an article by Sally Beatty in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Notebaert, CEO of Ameritech, was quoted as saying, ‘‘We have never had a product test this good.’’ He was referring to the Privacy Manager system, a service that worked in conjunction with Caller ID, whereby Ameritech intercepted calls from unidentified callers and requested that they identify themselves. In test runs 7 out of 10 calls did not make it through this first screening process and ring through to the customers, and as with collect calls, those that did offered customers the option of accepting or rejecting the calls depending on the callers’ recorded identification of themselves. With the rise in unsolicited telemarketing calls flooding into homes, Privacy Manager ‘‘satisfied a need that consumers have been pleading to have resolved,’’ said Notebaert.
The 1997 campaign personalized Ameritech by presenting a number of its employees as profiled by their own relatives—a wife, a nephew, and a father—who discussed the Ameritech workers’ commitment to providing outstanding service to customers. The 1998 campaign further personalized Ameritech’s services by presenting vignettes of inviolable family moments, such as reading a story to the kids at bedtime and shampooing their hair at bath time. Beneath these serene scenes Ammirati superimposed text about the Privacy Manager: ‘‘Would you interrupt this moment for an aluminum siding deal? Introducing Privacy Manager, a new service from Ameritech. It stops unwanted, unidentified calls before your phone even rings. Interested? For availability in your area, call 1-800-PRIVACY.’’ The understated simplicity of the spots won critical praise, and the launch of the Privacy Manager system was a business success.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In July 1997 Ameritech awarded the creative portion of its $100 million advertising account to Ammirati Puris Lintas, which beat out contender BBDO of New York, to end a four-month account review. The move consolidated Ameritech’s corporate, small business, and residential advertising, which had been split between Fallon McElligott of Minneapolis, DDB Needham of Chicago, and Leo Burnett of Chicago. According to Joan Walker, Ameritech’s senior vice president of corporate communications, as cited in an Adweek article by Alison Fahey, Ammirati won the account on the strength of its ‘‘strategic and creative insights.’’ Ammirati creative director Tom Nelson explained, ‘‘Everybody came together and the creative department came through. Usually, we have great strategy and [fine tune] the creative later. This time it was a total lock.’’ In order to service the account, Ammirati established an office in Chicago, where Ameritech was headquartered.
Ammirati revamped Ameritech’s existing tag line—dating back to 1993 and revised in 1995 to become ‘‘Your Link to Better Communication’’—changing it to read ‘‘In a World of Technology, People Make the Difference.’’ The 1997 advertising campaign focused on three Ameritech people: repairman Ted, customer service representative Angela, and emergency relief worker Jack. But instead of portraying them telling their own stories, Ammirati shifted the focus to family members speaking about their dedication. This displacement maintained the humility of the workers while contributing to the atmosphere of the campaign, which sought to highlight Ameritech as a company that fostered lasting familial relationships with its customers.
According to Sean Horgan, writing in the
Indianapolis Star, the strategy arose from in-depth research suggesting that ‘‘consumers always expect technological expertise and competitive prices, but make their final decisions based on which company is the most attentive to their needs.’’ Ameritech thus sought to present itself as user-friendly and responsive to customers’ needs. Lest these claims ring false, the company backed up its statements by spending as much as $1 billion over three years on substantive changes that included consolidated billing, employee and customer service training, and expanded products and services for small businesses. Above all, Ameritech sought to present its employees as attentive to the paramount importance of the telephone in modern life. ‘‘When you’re doing telecommunications, you’re doing something that makes a difference to the customer. The phone can be a lifeline. That makes our employees feel very important,’’ said Karen Sheriff, Ameritech’s director of corporate marketing and branding, in an Advertising Age article by Beth Snyder.
TARGET MARKET
By the time Ameritech hired Ammirati, the telecommunications corporation had achieved its goal of capturing consumer awareness, increasing brand recognition in its region from 8 percent in 1994 to 95 percent in 1997, or near complete saturation. Ameritech’s brand message thus had to become more sophisticated, moving consumers from merely recognizing the brand to preferring it over competitors. ‘‘People are looking beyond technology for people who can help them,’’ said Ameritech’s Walker in an Adweek article by Trevor Jensen. Hence the ‘‘people-centered’’ campaign of 1997.
Ameritech did not, however, abandon technological innovation as a means of appealing to consumers and of distinguishing itself from competitors. At the time the hot telecommunications technology was Caller ID, which displayed the name and telephone number of the incoming caller. As of September 1997, 19 percent of households in the United States had Caller ID, whereas a year later some 31 percent of the country’s households were using it. The Caller ID feature was not exclusive to Ameritech, however, and so the technology did not offer a clear point of distinction between Ameritech and the competition. Ameritech shrewdly extended the Caller ID concept into a more proactive system, gaining exclusivity with Privacy Manager. Ameritech applied for two patents to maintain the exclusivity and, in fact, intended to license the service to other telecommunications companies.

COMPETITION
Because the best means for growth for each company would be to carve into the other’s regional strongholds, Bell Atlantic, which had merged with Nynex Corp., represented Ameritech’s major competitor. According to Competitive Media Reporting, Bell Atlantic spent $160 million on advertising in 1996, compared to Ameritech’s $73 million. Both companies launched new advertising campaigns in 1997. Whereas Ameritech’s campaign leveraged family values and used fairly traditional techniques, Bell Atlantic attempted a more innovative strategy by riding the popular wave of animated advertising. Bell Atlantic did not abandon the past, however, as it retained the deep, resonating sound of James Earl Jones for its voice-overs. In addition, it used characters from Maurice Sendak’s popular children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, the first time Sendak had licensed the characters since his creation of them in 1963.
Bell Atlantic’s ad agency—the Lord Group of New York—applied current advertising strategies to give its campaign a fully contemporary feel. The campaign commenced with unidentified teaser ads, a contemporary advertising technique for creating interest in a campaign by capturing consumers’ attention and then further peaking their interest by leaving the identity of the advertiser a mystery. The teaser campaign started with outdoor advertising, including the 300-foot billboard adjacent to Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, a hub of commuter traffic and hence a highly visible site. Fifteen-second commercials, which began running on October 13, 1997, followed up on the outdoor effort by depicting the approaching footfalls of a Sendak cartoon monster, who burst through a white television screen containing the message ‘‘Wild things are happening.’’ The monster then pulled down a new screen containing the Bell Atlantic logo, like a history teacher pulling down a political map.
Two weeks later, on October 27, 1997, 30- and 60-second spots broke, accompanied by magazine and newspaper spreads, fully unveiling the campaign by extending the tag line to read, ‘‘Wild things are happening. Bell Atlantic. We’ll see you there.’’ The ads supported the theme by portraying the Sendak monsters guiding children through mazelike jungles. Snyder pointed out in her Advertising Age article that, according to Ray Smith, Bell Atlantic’s CEO, the campaign, which continued into 1998, was intended to ‘‘establish Bell Atlantic as the friendly, gentle giant leading customers through the communications jungle.’’

AMERITECH IRONS OUT THE IRONY
Numerous commentators pointed out the irony of Ameritech offering its Privacy Manager system to residential customers to block out unsolicited telemarketing calls from even ringing into the home. After all, Ameritech’s business included an arm devoted to telemarketing. Bob Garfield, the most acerbic of critics, commented in his Advertising Age review that ‘‘Ameritech protecting you from telemarketers is like R.J. Reynolds selling nicotine gum.’’ Commentators who picked up on this irony were quick to add, however, that Ameritech’s potential conflict of interest did not negate the benefits of the Privacy Manager system for consumers. Ameritech responded that it was simply answering consumer needs. ‘‘We have a variety of customers, some of whom have asked us for an intelligent way to manage calls into their home,’’ said Ameritech representative Dave Onak in a 1998 Adweek article. ‘‘So we really see no irony in this.’’ Furthermore, Ameritech maintained that ‘‘outbound’’ telemarketing, or calls into the home, represented a mere fraction of its overall business.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Ammirati hired veteran director Bob Giraldi of bicoastal Giraldi Suarez Productions—known for what Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield called ‘‘bombastic ’80s-era music videos’’ —to direct a series of five spots that introduced consumers to the Privacy Manager system. Giraldi responded with commercials that went counter to his stereotype, employing understatement instead of pushing the product with a hard sell. Giraldi easily could have resorted to presenting the problem, probably to great comic or shocking effect, by depicting the most heinous of privacy invasions by telemarketers. Instead, Giraldi and the Ammirati team—which included creative directors Jon Moore and Tim Kane, art director Sharon Dershin, copywriter Jody Finver, and producer Mary Ann Marino—chose to focus on the solution, depicting the kinds of familial and intimate scenes that would not be interrupted by unwanted telemarketing calls in those households that employed Privacy Manager. ‘‘Rubber Ducky,’’ one of the most memorable and effective of the spots, portrayed a father shampooing his son, who sat in a bathtub singing his ABCs. Giraldi positioned the camera to view the scene from the next room, with the bathroom door framing the shot, as if to respect the sacred space of this communal moment between father and son. Similarly, in the spot entitled ‘‘Snooze,’’ he angled the camera from the foot of the bed so that the audience focused on the father’s feet sandwiched between the two sets of his daughters’ feet. Even the book, which the father held open to their nighttime story, hid their faces, maintaining privacy. No voice-over interrupted the scenes. Instead, information about Privacy Manager scrolled unobtrusively across the bottom of the screen, further supporting the sense of respect for personal space.
The advertisers were so confident of the desirability of the Privacy Manager system that they limited their sales pitch to one word: ‘‘Interested?’’ ‘‘Hell yes, I’m interested,’’ Garfield responded in his review of the ads. Ameritech had succeeded in tapping into a nearly universal revulsion to telemarketers. ‘‘People don’t like telemarketers,’’ explained Fred Voit, consumer communications analyst with the Boston-based market research firm Yankee Group. While Voit stopped short of predicting the demise of telemarketing, as not all consumers annoyed by telemarketers would pay the extra monthly charges for Privacy Manager on top of the charges for the necessary Caller ID, he did, nevertheless, expect there to be a demand for the service.

OUTCOME
Garfield, the tough ad critic for Advertising Age, gave the Ameritech Privacy Manager campaign a rating of 3 ½ out of a possible 4 stars. He praised the marketing technique behind the five commercials in the campaign, which ‘‘dramatize the product benefits magnificently.’’ He complimented director Giraldi for ‘‘turn[ing] out cinematic vignettes of surpassing tenderness.’’ Describing the atmosphere of the spots, Garfield explained that the ‘‘mood, the moments are sublime.’’ The Advertising Women of New York joined Garfield in praising the campaign by giving Giraldi a 1999 Addy Award in the category of best direction for his work on the campaign.
It was interesting that even the contingent that stood to lose the most from the innovation applauded it. The American Telemarketing Association released a press statement maintaining that the organization had ‘‘always supported consumer choice in receiving information on goods and services over the phone.’’ The advent of the Privacy Manager sent the message to telemarketers that they needed to modify their strategies, since households were taking measures to protect themselves from existing telemarketing techniques. ‘‘I truly believe we’re at the saturation level,’’ commented telemarketing consultant Rudy Oetting of Oetting & Co. of New York. He saw the potential benefit of the Privacy Manager system to the telemarketing field in forcing it to improve techniques of targeting and reaching consumers who were truly interested in the services or products offered. Services such as Privacy Manager ‘‘will cause marketers who use the telephone channel to become more selective and creative in their approach so that people who do receive calls will be interested in what they’re being called about,’’ stated Oetting in Beatty’s Wall Street Journal article.