By Lisa Manfield

A sleek silver vehicle speeds down a winding highway, narrowly avoiding a hovering helicopter spewing bullets.

Skidding down a dirt embankment, the car executes a series of 360s to create a cloud cover while it skillfully eludes the menacing gunmen above and continues on its mission.

A Vegas strip drag race; a riverside hostage rescue; a bumpy ride for a mouthy superstar: all are scenarios in The Hire, a series of short films financed by BMW and directed and produced by some of Hollywood’s top names, including Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) and John Woo (Mission Impossible 2). Starring high-profile actors like Madonna, and with Clive Owen (The Croupier, Gosford Park) as the mysterious driver, the films showcase BMW models like the Z4 Roadster shooting through car chases, making rescues and completing dangerous deliveries.

Eight of these films reside online at BMWFilms.com. Since their Web launch in the spring of 2001, the big-budget productions have garnered critical acclaim and commendations, including an award for Best Action Short at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival and close to 20 million film views worldwide.

The audacity and innovation of this initiative has also sent ripples through the advertising and Internet marketing communities. Some have called it the remaking of Internet marketing—a new era of high-end Web content where art meets advertising—or disguises the ads altogether.

“When the first set of films came out, people actually went from desk to desk in the office and said, ‘Hey, have you seen this?’” said Baba Shetty, a principal analyst with Forrester Research who focuses on the impact of technology in the automotive marketplace.

“It was an immediate kind of viral marketing.”

Jim McDowell, vice-president of marketing for BMW North America, said the initiative was an attempt to create a branding campaign that “wasn’t easily imitatable by our competitors,” and insisted the films are designed to entertain, not advertise. “We had had some experience with entertainment from our involvement with the James Bond films, but we weren’t prepared to continue down the road of product placement.

We were trying to be true to our natural core—the responsive performance of our cars—but to articulate it in a new and meaningful way.”

It was BMW’s consumer profile that led the company to the Web for this project. “Eighty-five per cent of our purchasers were on the Web before they bought their BMW—and that number goes up every year,”McDowell said. “The idea of seeing a quality eight-minute film on my computer whenever I have the time was such an exciting concept.”

Leading the pack
BMW isn’t the only car manufacturer to sink big bucks into Internet promotions. According to Nielsen Media Research, automotive is the number one product category in terms of advertising dollars with nearly US$2 billion spent in Q1 2002, a 10 per cent increase over Q1 2001. “The auto industry is clearly the dominant advertiser in all categories,” Shetty said.“They tend to dominate in online spending as well. Not to the extent that they do offline but in some categories, like rich media units, automotive advertisers are far and away the dominant spenders.”

Going beyond the simple purchase of ad units like banners and pop-ups,many car companies are test-driving new ways of promoting their product online.Volvo, which in 1994 was the first auto manufacturer to advertise on the Web, also conducted the first Web-based vehicle launch in 2000—a sixmonth online ad campaign that consisted of oversized video banners, with no traditional advertising or marketing. The success of that project encouraged more involved Internet initiatives. Last year Volvo completed an 18-month Web-based awareness campaign leading up to the November 2002 launch of the XC90, its first SUV.

“We had a Web presence for that vehicle almost a full year before it went on sale,” said Phil Bienert, manager of CRM and e-business for Volvo. “We kicked off the first big awareness push with a live Web cast at the Detroit Motor Show. Anybody could go online and see the unveiling in real time. Once we got closer to the launch we could have people go online and configure a car.With no traditional media in place we’re sold out for the entire model year.”

Volvo’s primary approach has been to partner with other online brands in order to gain maximum exposure. “We entered into some long-term agreements with MSN and AOL to allow different media companies to really help us build momentum,” Bienert said. “We want to have a presence where there’s a nice brand fit.”

One such fit has been on MSN’s Carpoint site, where Volvo has developed a virtual showroom for its products. The site offers information on Volvo models and “allows the customer to have an enhanced experience that they couldn’t get in any other medium,” Bienert said.

“It allows them to have multiple levels of opt ins.”

Sounds like music
The German automaker Volkswagen has never shied away from innovation—in design or promotion. In fact, VW dabbled with Internet film content two years before BMW’s big-budget project. “We had a partnership with Atom Films prior to BMW doing their films,” said Todd Riley, Internet marketing manager and content leader for VW North America. “We picked some really cool independent films and sponsored them, just so our site users could come and experience what we thought were cool films.”

But VW quickly discovered the cost of integrating reel art into its promotion campaigns.“We had it online for about 18 months,” Riley said.

“It went down at the beginning of this year just because it was too expensive. I couldn’t make a business case anymore.”

Today, VW is driving a different kind of Web content: music. Its site now features an Internet radio station where listeners can check out the tunes featured in VW commercials —everything from Ella Fitzgerald to Pink Floyd. “With our advertising we’ve included a lot of music,” Riley said. “People started to e-mail us—and we’re talking hundreds and thousands per month—saying ‘What is that great song in that commercial?’ And that’s why Radio VW came about.We handpick selections of music—things we think are cool. It’s a [chance] for us to connect with customers, and if I have 1,000 people a day coming that would be enough for me to say we can keep it.”

The art of promotion
Web initiatives like those of BMW, Volvo and VW are prime examples of a new convergence in the ad industry, something brand guru Naomi Klein called “branding-content integration” in her book No Logo. “Rather than simply bankrolling someone else’s content, all over the Net corporations are experimenting with the much-coveted role of being ‘content providers,’” she wrote. By mixing engaging artistic content—be it films,music or even live Web casts—with marketing messages, car companies are at the frontline of this phenomenon, raising the bar on Internet advertising and promotions.

“Everyone’s looking for something that gets away from the 50-year-old model of ad placement,” Forrester’s Shetty said.

“There are so many variables now as to what you can do to reach consumers, and the key is really what has the most alignment with what your brand’s all about.

“VW has the ability to say ‘We are a go-to source for music that you’ll probably really like.’ They’ve earned that right over the last seven or eight years,” Shetty continued. “And BMW Films has gotten a huge amount of attention because it breaks a lot of the rules about how to market to consumers. But a lot of things have to go right for it to be able to work, and BMW has been able to put all of the pieces together to execute flawlessly.”

There’s no doubt BMW’s bold foray into big-budget films has raised questions about how far to go on a Web campaign— and how much to spend. “What a lot of people are still waiting for is for BMW to release the actual sales results from the campaign,”Volvo’s Bienert said. “Maybe they have a different equation than I do, but when you’re looking at that many tens of millions of dollars, I would need to be able to demonstrate the real business impact, and I think everybody in the ad community is waiting for BMW to tell us.”

As for BMW, while the automaker won’t reveal budgets or sales figures, McDowell doesn’t hesitate to laud his company’s recent market performance. “We had the best year we’d ever had in 2001, and that was despite Sept. 11.We had an even better year in 2002. Whether the films are directly responsible for that or not, all I can say is that our product and our marketing mix certainly has resulted in a dramatic market performance.”

Web Wheels
BMW http://www.bmw.com
BMW Films http://www.bmwfilms.com
Forrester Research http://www.forrester.com
MSN Carpoint http://www.autos.msn.com
Nielsen Media Research http://www.nielsenmedia.com
Volkswagen http://www.vw.com
Volvo http://www.volvo.com
Volvo Virtual Showroom http://www.autos.msn.com/showroom/volvo