In a new incarnation of The Hire–Fallon’s famous branded content endeavor for BMW–the “Driver” character that Clive Owen brought to life in eight short films is now appearing in a series of comic books. Creative directors David Carter and Bruce Bildsten at Fallon, Minneapolis, oversaw the project, but publisher Dark Horse Comics (Sin City, Star Wars) took the reigns, assigning writers and artists to create the fictitious renderings.
Of the six books being released this year, the first two, “Scandal” and “Precious Cargo,” are currently available at book stores.
“I think that [Dark Horse] is right for it because they’re certainly younger — in comparison to like Marvel or DC Comics that have been around forever–they’re kind of more establishment. Dark Horse has titles that are a lot edgier and felt like kind of a hipper, younger publisher,” Carter related.
In “Scandal” by writer Matt Wagner and artist Francisco Ruiz Velasco, a rich hotel heiress hires the “Driver” as part of a scam to keep a seedy story about herself from surfacing in the tabloids, Carter explained. In “Precious Cargo,” the “Driver” comes to the aid of a pregnant woman who is being chased by mobsters in Detroit. Bruce Campbell was the writer and Kilian Plunkett was the artist.
This initiative was conceived in part to keep the character of the “Driver” out in popular culture as an extension of the brand. Carter added that, “With the proliferation of comic book movies and super hero movies, comic books are kind of in vogue.”
Unlike The Hire short films, the cars featured in the comics are not BMWs that you would see on the road. Fallon had BMW Designworks collaborate with the artists to create concept cars for the stories.
EXPANDING IDEAS
Content creation for the client was in this case much different from the traditional model. For the comic books, most of the creative was developed outside of the agency. After giving the writers a detailed brief on the character, the creatives at Fallon turned much of the story development over to another entity, although they and the client oversaw the project throughout its evolution.
“It’s very different,” Carter said. “With the films we were very involved but this is a much different world. I mean I’m not a comic writer…As long as we got good writers and artists and as long as they kept the character cool and made the stories cool, I was completely fine with it because we all knew that they would do a good job with it, if we got the right people on board.”
The comic book creators did have some clear guidelines to follow. They needed to keep the content at PG-13 level. And, an important note was that the “Driver” could not carry a gun. Beyond that, the creatives did not want the comic book authors to delve into the character’s past. He is a mysterious man without a name and it was important to keep that mystique alive in these new stories.
“Getting this out [to the comic world] and making the story lines entertaining and engaging gets to a market that absolutely skews probably younger than the demographic [for BMW automobiles]. But it’s a market that is very much on the edge, kind of setting the standard for what’s cool, hip and interesting,” Carter said of why this was the right branding move for BMW. “I guess they’d kind of be, in a weird way, early adopters if you want to use a marketing term, but these are the people who are on the edge setting the standard for everyone else and so the comics are a way to engage with them.”