In the past, when a carmaker wanted to introduce a new vehicle, all they had to do was make a big announcement with bells and whistles at the annual North American International Auto Show in Detroit, and launch a TV campaign that featured the car strutting its stuff on winding roads.
Now, with consumers increasingly getting information from fragmented media sources, automakers–and their agencies–are getting more creative. For instance, Mini Cooper, with the help of its former agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami, created DVDs that warn consumers of “counterfeit” Minis and launched a Web package purporting that Minis parts were being used to build robots. Among the latest entries in creative packages promoting cars across varied platforms is the Audi A3 effort “The Heist,” out of agency McKinney, Raleigh, N.C. “We always knew what we wanted the end result to be,” says Regina Brizzolara, who oversaw the package from its inception in her role as senior VP/director of broadcast at McKinney. “And we literally tackled it one week at a time. We had some very specific things on the calendar that were critical. And in between them, we dealt with what was at hand.”
Indeed there was a lot at hand on the “The Heist,” an all-encompassing ad vehicle that blended fiction and reality. It began on March 31 when a new Audi A3 was “stolen” from a dealership in New York, where it had been on loan from the New York Auto Show. Wild postings and TV spots followed, all featuring the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN) as well as a phone number and Web site to report sightings and information about the car. Woven through the TV spots were the features offered on the A3. All this set the stage for an alternate reality game (ARG), which involved the search for the car. Fictional characters such as Nisha Roberts of Last Resort Retrieval, an art recovery service, maintained a Web site where people could track the progress of the search. There was also her assistant, Ian Yarbrough, and a videogame developer called Virgil Tatum. Roberts and her team had to find digital memory cards, which contained the details of an art heist at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. The cards were strategically placed in A3s on display at live events like the E3 gaming conference and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival–real-life gamers could search for the cards at the events by answering ads. Turns out that Roberts and her gang needed the data-rich memory card in the stolen A3 because it contained code that would allow the encrypted data in the other cards to be revealed. The campaign culminated in June with an event at the Viceroy hotel in Santa Monica, where the identity of the architect of the Uffizi heist was revealed–it was Emile Smithson, head of programming at Yabrough’s gaming company, Virgil King of Code.
Creating all the elements for “Art of the Heist” involved a number of people: Mike Monello of Campfire, a division of bicoastal Chelsea Pictures, served as director on the project, guiding the story, and overseeing all the elements that needed to be produced. (Much of the footage on the Web sites was shot using palmOne Treo cell phones.) On the agency side, the creative team included executive creative director David Baldwin, group creative directors Dave Cook and Jonathan Cude, copywriter Matt Fischvogt, art director Jason Musante, head writer and co-director Brian Cain, and copywriters Ernie Larsen and Jim Gunshanon. Making sure all the elements came together was Brizzolara, who joined McKinney in 1994 from Avenue Edit, Chicago, and became director of broadcast in ’00. She notes that while challenging, “Art of the Heist” was also a great learning experience. “As a producer, it’s in your nature to love a challenge,” she relates, “and take the unknown and crystallize it.”
THE PROCESS
With so many elements to wrangle, communication and planning were key. “I started working with the creatives and media [planners] immediately,” explains Brizzolara. “We loved the idea of the car going missing from the auto show. That was really the impetus, and we started working there, until our finale, talking to media. We knew that we wanted many of the elements–the wild postings, the small space ads, the live events, and we knew TV would be a component.” Brizzolara notes that she and her team worked closely with the Audi client every step of the way as well.
The decision to collaborate with Campfire came about in part because of its involvement in two other huge integrated packages that involved ARGs: The “Beta 7” project for ESPN/Sega, and the Sharp Aquos “Legend of the Secret Urns” game that was part of the “More to See” campaign–both were done via Wieden+Kennedy, New York. Brizzolara has high praise for the efforts of the Campfire crew, noting that they had “unbelievable enthusiasm and commitment to this project from the start.”
Brizzolara notes that she and her team became involved with a new circle of vendors and partners. In addition to Palm, companies like Apple and Bose were involved in the project, and the agency worked to secure venues for the live events, as well as participation in events like Coachella and E3. The involvement with “Art of the Heist” helped not only Audi, but could wind up benefiting other McKinney clients as well: “The lessons are definitely applicable across all our clients, no doubt about it,” reports Brizzolara. “We have lots of different ideas on the table for our different clients.”
As for what she learned, Brizzolara relates, “I don’t know if I think about it in terms of a new skill set. I think getting more involved with the other departments has been incredible. And I think the level of involvement while still in the concept stage is very different in terms of trying to be forward thinking.”