The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: Movie Trailer

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. There are so many reasons why I love the look of this movie, not least:

• Super Size Me legend, Morgan Spurlock is fronting it. Guaranteed, good honest humour whilst proving a salient, sobering point along the way
• It is completely self-referential – a film proving its own point that we are over-advertised to through the medium of film and television, whilst acknowledging it wouldn’t exist without that very industry. I just love a good old paradox
• By the look of the movie posters, he actually manages to convince Californian-based pomegranate juice-makers POM Wonderful to take the $1m title sponsorship. I cannot wait to see that boardroom table discussion
• The issue of our contemporary over-dosing on product placement is placed front and centre (anyone who doubts the presence of brands in movies needs to check out Brand Channel‘s great database, Brand Cameo)
• Great title (though he will need to be forgiven for borrowing from Frank Rich’s book of the same name)

The premise is a simple one – can you make a movie using only budget acquired from sponsors and advertisers? If you’re wondering how Spurlock came up with the idea in the first place, his director’s statement in the movie’s press pack is worth a read.

(and no fewer than 12 pages of the 23-page press pack are dedicated to ‘A word from our sponsors’. So it’s a fair that bet he accomplished what he set out to…)

I think my favourite exchange in the trailer below, is from Spurlock’s conversation with politician Ralph Nader:

Spurlock: Where should I be able to go where I don’t see one bit of advertising?

[beat]

Nader: To sleep.

Not currently slated for a UK theatrical release this year, this might be one for festival screenings and a smaller-scale art-house release. But for the time being watch the trailer and enjoy:

 

Mercedes-Benz on the runway

Thoughts welcome on the LFW advertising offering from Mercedes-Benz:

I’ve been meaning to post this ad for a while but, if I’m honest I haven’t quite figured out if I think it is freshingly and strikingly simple, or just plain dull.

On first sight, it struck me as a very straightforward concept, that perfectly conveyed the brand partnership between the luxury car dealer and Fashion Week. The runway as a road, M-B as the only vehicle suitable to transport you down it – or, as a metaphor for life’s runway. Thus the glamorous audience feasting on the fashions falling off the runways of London Fashion Week are perfectly poised to see M-B as the only car to be seen dead in this season (or, hopefully a little longer, considering the investment).

I tore it from Stylist and it has sat on my desk ever since. And during that time, I’ve actually grown to be disappointed with it. The simplicity that had first so impressed me – the thought of how easy it would have been to construct and shoot – suddenly struck me as lacking the luxe I expect from an M-B ad. The lighting was so garish, the chairs so basic, the whole set so uninspired.

That infamous YSL quote of fashion fading and style remaining eternal is an interesting one to ponder in this creative context. I would punt that M-B would far rather associate themselves with style than fashion, but ordinarily their sponsorship of Fashion Weeks around the world does this well. But the ad creative above positions the Fashion Week runway at its most stark, most functional and lacking the lustre and style that we so hope to see from the M-B brand.

That said, maybe I’m reading far too much into it. Ads weren’t designed to be analysed, they were designed for instant impact; to convey a message in the time it takes for the eye to process a concept to the brain, and the brain to draw upon all its reserves of previous experience to interpret a message. My instinct liked it, my inner-annalyst did not.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Jack Wills Freshers’ Tour, sponsored by… Jack Wills

Just yesterday at Synergy towers, there was some collective musing going on around how the face of sponsorship could change in the next few decades. And that got me thinking about that ever-elusive demographic – the 16-24 year olds – to see how they might be running businesses and consuming media in 25 years’ time.

One area of interest is how immune (or not) youth of today have become to brand presence in their everyday lives. Do they reject it (oft-quoted myth)? Do they embrace it (when it suits them)? Do they challenge it to give them added value before giving it their valuable attention (‘what’s in it for me’)? Or do they ignore it altogether?

Or, have they come to expect it as par for the course of being entertained? I wondered if the ‘such and such, brought to you by…’ had become such a ubiquitous tag to music concerts / sporting fixtures / televised events, that people in 10 or 20 years might actually notice an absence of brand more than its presence. After all, I was hearing this mandatory credit line before I could even read, from the loveable muppets of Sesame Street (‘Sesame Street was brought to you by the number 8 and letters D and M…’ etc.)

But one interesting application of the sponsorship concept was brought to me today by Britain’s favourite University Outfitter, Jack Wills.

Having just returned from a summer of fun in New England, the brand’s bright young marketing things are about to embark on another grand tour of the UK’s trendiest universities. JW will be at a Freshers’ Week near you in the next few weeks, combining their fabulously British fashion with cutting edge, fresh new music – via the brand’s evolving unofficial music label, JWUnsigned.

But what caught my eye in the creative flyer for the Tour, was the sponsorship line. Bearing in mind that this is a Jack-Wills event, delivered as a music tour produced by a Jack Wills sub-brand, it is ‘sponsored by’ – wait for it – a Jack Wills denim range. This year’s JWUnsigned Freshers Tour is brought to you by No.350-4-842 – the brand’s denim clothing line.

This I feel points to some interesting signs about the presence that sponsorship has in the lives of youth culture today. Sponsorship in its basic sense – brand-pays-rights-holder – cannot apply here given that both the sponsor and property are from the same stable. So one assumes that JW is using the Tour platform to leverage awareness of its 350-4-842 denim as almost a stand-alone brand, instantly recognizable in and of itself but crucially as part of the Jack Wills family.

But I sense that there must be an implicit acceptance here by the Tour’s marketeers that their target consumers are so expectant of a live event being sponsored, it has become a necessary element of the Tour name. ‘Sponsored by…’ acts in this case as a ready-made stamp of officialdom: all big music events are sponsored so the JWUnsigned Tour needs to be too, in order to gain stature and acceptance within the youth marketplace. 

St. Andrew’s, Leeds, Edinburgh, London, Bristol, Nottingham, Guildford and Brighton all appear to be on the list of host cities for the Tour events, and I’m intrigued to see what these will look like. How will JW use the opportunity to engage with their fans? Will they be actively spreading the word of their ‘Worn in but not Worn Out’ denim range to a captive audience of indie music fans? Will the bands be wearing the jeans during all their sets? Or is that ‘sponsored by…’ tag ultimately just that – a tagline?

And most interesting of all – will the legions of JW-loving Freshers either notice or, perhaps more importantly, care?

Murray HEADs into the quarters… with a new racket

After his epic victory on Centre Court on Monday evening, Andy Murray seems to have given mixed reviews on the now infamous Centre Court roof. While during the match, the humidity clearly affected play, Murray has since expressed his enjoyment of the crowd atmosphere gained by effectively playing indoors.

Less positive for his racket sponsor, HEAD, was that half way through a game in the crucial fifth and final set his strings broke, forcing him to play out the rest of the point effectively using a hand-held trampoline. Granted, the conditions may have induced a weakening of the strings beyond Murray’s usual expectations of his racket’s life-span, but even so – hardly an ideal impression to give tennis fans during play.

With that in mind, the Daily Mirror’s back page today made me chuckle:

I guess a back page headline must be some consolation for a broken racket.

Lions rugby ads – the good, the bad and the worst

As we’ve recently been on the topic of brands capitalising on big sporting headlines, I thought it apt to take a look at two Lions rugby-themed ads which caught my eye this week. And for rather different reasons.

HSBC, main sponsor of the British & Irish Lions team have thrown a shed-load of their marketing budget at above the line activation of the sponsorship this summer – and rightly so as their main sporting sponsorship property deserves. Amongst a huge range of creatives, sits the ad below, which I just love. It’s simple, brand-warming and conveys their grassroots-rugby-support message brilliantly:

(Although I should say at this juncture that I am definitely less of a fan of their Sky Sports indents that wrap all the Lions coverage – though opinion seems widely divided on this one).

Of course, as with all major sporting properties, illegitimate brands will always try to hi-jack the topical news agenda with strategic placement of their own ads at key moments. Cue male hair-dye company Just For Men jumping on the back of the Lions’ campaign with the below. Total comedy.

Brawn GP signs up Branson’s Virgin brand

Richard Branson / Ross Brawn

The news of the above union only reached me this afternoon when having coffee with a friend (rather embarrassingly given that he had just flown in from New York and already had more of a finger on the pulse of the UK news agenda than me…).

But what excited me more than the fact that the naked Brawn GP car will finally be clothed in logos and livery this season after all, was the fact that the story was broken exclusively on TimesOnline before anywhere else.

Another triumph for UK online media topping the global news agenda. Awesome.