By Emily Vines

Entering the entertainment space as a content provider is a new role for Verizon, but one which members of the company embraced when sponsoring this year’s ProMotion Pictures’ Verizon Broadband Film Competition. Three filmmaking teams–comprised of students from New York University’s Stern School of Business and Tisch School of the Arts’ Kanbar Institute of Film and Television graduate programs–won the opportunity to create branded short films, less than 10 minutes long, about the transforming power of broadband. Each team was given $40,000 to complete its project. Interactive marketing agency R/GA, New York, brought ProMotion and client Verizon together. (McGarry Bowen, New York, is Verizon’s corporate ad agency).

    The competition asks students from each school to work together on branded short film proposals, including a script and budget. Twenty nine teams submitted their work for the competition, which was judged on creativity, budget feasibility and appropriateness to brand. The three winners went on to make their films with Verizon’s message–the transformative nature of broadband–in the forefront of their minds. Of her involvement with the process, director of interactive marketing at Verizon Beth Mulhern, related, “I was trying to communicate to them what I needed these films to do from a business perspective and that was [a] good learning [experience] for them and that’s very much what the real world is like too.”

The winning films are The Grey Woman written and directed by A. Sayeeda Clarke (Tisch), produced by Scott Woodruff (Stern) and Brigitte Valentine; The Adventures of Modem Boy written and directed by Jordan Ross (Tisch) with Melissa DiCarlo (Stern) and Felix Banuchi (Stern) producing; and Back Home written, directed and edited by Andrew M. Hulse (Tisch) with Victoria Swire Yoffie (Tisch) and Lisa Goodman (Stern) producing.

 

SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT

In The Grey Woman, we meet a woman, Camilla, who moves in a colorful outside world, but she–and everything and everyone in her apartment–is washed out in gray tones. For her birthday, her mother sends someone to work on her computer and outfit her with the works. Once the computer is improved, color enters Camilla’s room from the monitor, which is downloading music.

A few moments later, the gentleman who renovated the computer returns to Camilla’s abode and stays colorful even after entering her apartment. He runs over to a band that suddenly appears playing music; he dances and exits the scene. Camilla then sees a vibrant red rose growing outside of her window. She runs out to the garden as it transitions from black and white to bright colors and she takes in the view. Returning to her apartment, which is now in color, she is also maintaining life-like tones.

Sitting at her computer, she looks at a framed photo of a man and begins an e-mail, “I would love to see you again — could we meet?” She then answers a knock at the door and finds the black-and-white man from the photo. After an embrace, he is colorful too. It seems her connection to the Internet has literally brightened her world.

The Adventures of Modem Boy introduces us to Billy, who was born a modem child. A narrator describes his shortcomings, such as being unable to answer questions because his dial-up connection, which seems to be in his brain, fails. In school, bullies tease him for his inability to think fast.

Eventually Billy’s parents call Verizon and he is outfitted with broadband cables for a DSL connection. Billy became so fast that he went on to win races, speed read and garner accolades for his achievements in nuclear physics. As most heroes do, he also gets the girl. Their child is wired with an even faster fiber optic line (which Verizon is in the process of rolling out).

Back Home tells a more realistic tale. In it, a former high school football player’s company provides the money to buy new uniforms for his alma mater team. He also donates a Web camera to broadcast the games online. Now the former player can watch the games on his computer and cheer for his team when he can’t be there in person.

 

GROWTH POTENTIAL

Verizon’s account director at R/GA, Richard Marks, felt the competition, which is in its second year, represented a good fit for his client. Verizon has a “Richer. Deeper. Broader.” campaign that focuses on showcasing the company as a broadband provider, not just a phone company. Part of the push was for people to log onto www.BroadbandStories.com. That site features documentary-style short films about real people and authentic, positive stories of broadband use. Some of the interviews are with everyday people while others are with celebrities like members of the Dave Matthews Band.

R/GA also created both the Broadband Stories and film competition Web sites. The latter features behind-the-scenes links to journals and storyboards as well as documentary footage of the filmmaking process. “We wanted the site to highlight the movies, clearly, but to be more experiential, to allow people to dig as deep or as shallow as they wanted to into these films,” Marks said.

The film competition provided a way for Verizon to reach their 18-34 year old demographic, since traditional means of direct mail and television might not connect with this target audience. “We are trying to find new ways to reach them and we think doing these broadband films was a really entertaining and engaging way to do that,” Mulhern said. She went on to explain how the competition also ties into a new Verizon offering–FiOS. It is a fiber optic Internet service that Verizon is beginning to provide in select areas of the U.S. The technology offers very fast broadband service (from 5 Mbps to 30 Mbps) that can support Internet and television services.

    “We have a new product that really debuted in Keller, Texas, in September called FiOS TV and so that is really going to put Verizon in the entertainment space and we thought that the movies, besides being a way to communicate the transformational benefits of broadband, also gave us a way to say, ‘Hey look, Verizon can do more than just your phone service, more than just broadband, but we can do entertainment too.’ ” She went on to say that Verizon-produced content isn’t something they are currently offering through FiOS, but they are looking to do so in the future.

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