About this time last year, I wrote about Ford’s “commercial-free” sponsorship of the Season Premiere of “24”. Instead of the regular advertising pods during the normal programming, Ford created a six-minute mini-movie that ran directly before and after the show.
The sponsorship was a direct result of the growing interest in the convergence between Madison Avenue and Hollywood, based on concerns about continued fragmentation, consumer apathy, TiVo and the like.
Strategically, the approach is far superior to the old way of doing business. The intro- and exit-messages (sound familiar?) are the least disruptive forms of commercials. The only problem is that consumers don’t give a damn either way.
I described this move as Borg-esque in nature. (For the few readers who are not Star Trek literate, the Borg is a highly evolved, technologically advanced species which, based on network effects of assimilating many cultures, evolves and adapts quickly to new environments, threats and challenges.)
I use this analogy because it is so sweet. The parallels associated with technology, adapting to change, convergence and “integration” are uncanny. However, the real reasons I used this metaphor are two-fold:
- The Borg war-cry: resistance is futile; you will be assimilated, which could very well be the Internet’s call to action.
- The notion of an idea working once and then never again (once is witty…) or put differently: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
I couldn’t help but feel that this ambitious attempt to mimic BMWFilms was on a one-way course to disaster. For starters, every couch potato’s bible (People, Entertainment, TV Guide etc.) telegraphed this move a mile away, so it wasn’t going to be difficult to tune out in the first few minutes. And secondly, you didn’t even need a TiVo to skip (directly or indirectly) the portly commercials.
Furthermore, the cost per 30-second then was $184,550 and so multiplying the standard number of commercials in a network hour by the going rate, even allowing for a generous discount on the package deal equaled big bucks. I couldn’t help but wonder how this mega sponsorship was going to be measured and evaluated.
But credit where credit is due, the mini-movie was one of the most recalled TV spots of the year according to Intermedia Advertising Group. However, this isn’t saying much as the bar is set pretty low when compared against the rest of the run of network.
And so one year later – with a 30-second spot on “24” now costing $292,200, a 58.3% increase over the previous season, Ford is back.
One could take this as a sign that last year’s deal did its job. In addition, considering the abysmal Prime Time performances this year, “24” stands out as a lone rose among the thorns. For this reason, assuming Ford locked in an attractive first-mover’s rate-of-first-refusal from the previous year; the company got the deal of the century.
This being said, when you have $100 million to spend on a launch, there are only a finite number of ways to waste it (and besides, the chimpanzee billion-dollar game-show idea was already taken). In other words, let’s not give the folks too much credit in the accountability department.
And besides, how many commercial-hating consumers the second time around would not have been aware of the logistics of the sponsorship and therefore, how to effortlessly marginalize it? (rhetorical)
Here’s how it went down in the Jaffe household:
- I began watching “24” at around 9:03 and 30 seconds.
- I finished watching “24” at 9:57, skipped past the 2 ½ minute conclusion and then previewed “scenes from the next”
Thank you Ford. Thank you so much for your generosity in bringing “24” to me commercial free. Oh and by the way, I drive an Audi.
P.S. Your agency also thanks you for granting them the ridiculously over-inflated production budget to make their little masterpiece.
But wait, there’s a catch.
Curiosity got the better of me and so purely as a research exercise I decided to jump back to the beginning and force myself to watch the extended commercial.
The first 3 ½ minutes were downright horrible. The borrowed interest on the whole “24” theme was contrived. The acting, or should I say, overacting was embarrassing. It’s like tuning in to a gourmet cooking show and watching another show sandwiched in-between offering tips on cooking hot dogs.
When the first segment ended with a reminder to tune in at the end of the program to see “how it all ends”, I was ready to hit the delete button. However, being the masochist that I am, I decided to continue the experiment and stick along for a wee bit longer.
The joke was on me. The Donation was a spoof. The overacting was intentional. The twist was that the baddies had targeted Jeff Bauer, instead of Jack Bauer, to make an important drop of a rather larger sum of unmarked bills (not the new colorful kind) and so thanks to his F-150, this man-in-the-street gets away with the money.
At this particular moment, the two worlds of creative and media came crashing together at a point in time when agencies continue to separate the two; at a time when the networks might as well be renamed notworks.
This might have been one of these epiphanies when I had witnessed the sound of a tree falling in the forest, but I had been the only one present and therefore realized that no one would have believed me.
In other words, all the advertising talent and creativity in the world is useless if no one is there to witness and appreciate it.
This bandage solution was a half-hearted attempt to stem the shotgun-sized wound of fleeting viewers. The irony was that Ford felt that too much product placement within the content would have been overstepping its boundaries, but everything else was fair game.
But what the hell do I know…I’m sure Ford will be back in 2004 for more punishment.
