Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, 6th Edition

11MAKE THE IDEA BIGGER, NOT THE LOGO: OR, WHY BRANDED CONTENT IS MORE INTERESTING THAN ADVERTISING.

IN MY OFFICE AT FALLON, THE FUTURE of all advertising was changed with one brilliant idea. No wait, not my office, it happened in the office just down the hall from mine, actually. That's where the creative team working on BMW entirely changed the course of advertising history. (Honest mistake. They were just two doors down from my office.) In that office, the BMW team came up with an idea that disrupted everything everybody knew about advertising.

Before that time, the accepted wisdom was this: if a brand's annual media spend for advertising was x, then its agency could spend no more than 20 percent of x to produce all the advertising—every single ad, billboard, commercial, photo shoot, all of it had to be covered in that 20 percent.

But Fallon's pitch was the opposite.

“Okay, you know all those TV commercials we usually make? And all the print ads we publish? And all those media schedules we normally spend months planning? Yeeeeaah, we're gonna go ahead and throw all that out and take the year's entire budget and give it to some Hollywood peeps. To make eight movies. C'mon! Whaddaya say?”

The concept was called The Hire, a series of short movies starring Clive Owen as a driver-for-hire, all directed by A-list Hollywood directors (listed in Figure 11.1) and all available for free on the web. The first one to air, Ambush, was directed by John Frankenheimer and it was so not a ...