To round out the marketing campaign for Xbox’s new racing game Forza Motorsport, Jason Harris and Mike Lewis, co-founders/producers of creative studio Plan C, San Francisco, created Xcelerators, a series of five short films based on car cultures featured in the game. American Muscle, Tuner/Drifter, Exotic Modified, Super Unlimited and European Motors profile enthusiasts from each genre of racing. The films are on the Web at www.forzamotorsport.xbox.com.
Forza Motorsport will be in direct competition with PlayStation’s established Gran Turismo, which is in its fourth edition. “We worked directly with the Xbox client and came up with the idea of playing up the lifestyle elements of this game because the games are all so technically tight and sound now-a-days so you can’t put game screen vs. game screen,” Lewis related.
American Muscle features interviews with three people who love their American muscle cars from the 1960s and ’70s, like a Mercury Cougar and Chevrolet Camaro. Meanwhile the edgy Tuner/Drifter takes us into a lesser-known world. The tuner element involves modifying stock cars like Acuras, often to achieve greater power and enhance the overall appearance, while drifting can be done in any kind of car according to one interviewee. Drifting is a practice of skidding in a controlled manner, which has been popular in Japan and is now growing into the U.S.
In Exotic Modified, the focus is on Porsches–modified Porsches that is–some of which achieve 700 horsepower. In the fourth film, Super Unlimited a racer explains that this label means that there are no limits on budget, engines or cars. These cars are built for racing and are not street legal. Lastly, European Motors spotlights Ferraris and Formula One racing.
Each genre’s racers believe their techniques and their cars are superior. At the end of each of the shorts, which are approximately four to five minutes long, “You are what you race,” appears on screen followed by an Xbox end tag.
Excluding references to the game was a conscious decision, global group marketing manager for Xbox Eli Friedman said. The intention with the documentaries is to relay the message that the brand understands people, their cars and their passion for racing.
To find the racers in each film, Harris and Lewis visited car shows, racetracks and garages. “It’s not hard to find car enthusiasts, but it’s hard to find the people that are actually working on the cars themselves and are connected that way,” Lewis related. “It was also finding the people that were the most real and not going to play up to the camera. They were more about representing their genre, their sector.”
CREATIVE COALITION
McCann-Erickson, New York, holds Xbox’s advertising account, though everything except U.S media is currently in transition to the San Francisco office. Friedman explained that he approached Lewis and Harris because he was familiar with their work and wanted to see if they had any marketing ideas that would enhance the launch of Forza Motorsport. The Web films worked, he said, because they represented a way to talk about people’s passions for racing.
“Plan C collaborated with [McCann-Erickson] quite a bit just to understand the essence of the campaign, what we were doing, what we were bringing to life to make sure in their production these pieces connected and they were true to the concept, true to what we were trying to say and that it felt like a well-rounded campaign as opposed to something disconnected,” Friedman added.
“This was to plus out their ad campaign, to actually show, ‘Hey, look, we are engrossed and enmeshed in this culture and we’ve looked at it from every different angle of racing or genre of racing,’ ” Harris said.
Jeff Apps with Modern Industry Pictures, Los Angeles, directed the films. David Morrison was DP. Freelance editor Kevin Zimmerman cut the work and Jimi Simmons of Ntropic, San Francisco, was the colorist.