I Want to Direct

Jeff Schmale won a Cadillac in five seconds. It took Kristina Robbins-Higgins three weeks and 3,000 miles to win an Audi A3. Both won a moment in the spotlight.

Marketers — especially car companies — have embraced independent films as a marketing platform, turning fringe art into mainstream marketing, with film festival sponsorships (VW for Sundance, Audi for American Film Institute, Lincoln Mercury for Moviefone Short Film Festival), cameos — and contests. From Cadillac and Honda to Cingular and Intel, marketers have harnessed consumers’ creativity and ambition, often upstaging their own brands. Turning the lens on consumers’ egos, it turns out, is actually a pretty good way to build a brand.

Credit two raging entertainment trends for fueling film-contest fever: Branded entertainment and reality TV. Branded content is so hot that “film contests are a way to engage consumers and create brand-based content that other consumers can enjoy,” says Arc Worldwide Chief Creative Officer Bill Rosen, whose agency’s work for Cadillac won PROMO’s top PRO Award last month. Couple that with “the proliferation of reality shows, blogs and other star-making vehicles [that have consumers] focused on achieving 15 minutes of fame, and independent film contests can be positioned as an enabler of the desire harbored by many consumers.”

Plus, ever-more affordable technology gives a lot of consumers the tools to make an indy film or at least short, Rosen adds.

Ironically, the growth comes as BMW of America, whose bmwfilms.com pioneered film-as-marketing, reportedly has backed off the strategy, partly because it’s popularity has made it too expensive — and following the April departure of CMO Jim McDowell, who spearheaded bmwfilms.com.

Cadillac’s first-quarter contest for five-second films was part of a broader tie-in with the premiere of Be Cool to tout three models that reach 60 mph in less than five seconds. TV sent viewers online to enter, see finalists — and request dealer info. In all, Cadillac fielded 43,000 more requests than the same period a year ago.

This month, Honda wraps up an animated-short contest pegged to Cartoon Network’s offbeat nighttime programming block Adult Swim. Entrants submit their film (up to five minutes) at AdultSwim.com. The winning short — chosen by Adult Swim animators at production studio Williams Street — will run on the site and on Adult Swim VOD. The campaign reinforces Civic’s ad tagline “Civic: It will reverse your thinking.” Honda’s ad agency RPA, Santa Monica, CA, handles.

“The new Civic is so rockin’ that we couldn’t just put it out there as another new car,” says Lisa Herdman, RPA VP-associate director of network programming. “We wanted to target people via self-expression in emotional, passionate way.” Adult Swim’s irreverent tone and high ratings with adults 18-49 led to an ad buy and the contest.

Last spring, Audi of America tapped its sponsorship of the American Film Institute’s AFI FEST to hand-pick three emerging directors to drive cross-country and shoot 15-minute films that were posted online in July for a consumer vote to via for a 2006 Audi A3 and $10,000. All three films can be viewed at www.audiusa.com/A3 through November.

It’s a wrap-around

Ford Motor Co.’s Lincoln Mercury has aggressively harnessed independent film to skew its brand to twenty- and thirtysomething drivers. It began last fall, when Mercury used an indy film feel to triple traffic to its redesigned Web site mercuryvehicles.com. A sub-site screened “Meet the Lucky Ones,” a five-week series of short films about a wacky family. (A sweeps and heavy online ad support drove traffic to the site.) Mercury sold about 500 Mercury Mariner SUVs directly because of the films, and mercuryvehicles.com’s traffic tripled to 825,000 unique visitors in the first two weeks alone — and has quintupled since then. In June and July, Mercury gave away one million DVDs of the films this summer as premiums in Amazon.com DVD orders — and expects that exposure to spur sales of another 500 cars.

Wunderman Detroit and lead ad agency Young & Rubicam collaborated on the effort as part of Mercury’s “New Doors Opened” campaign. (Mercury earmarked 25% of the budget for online and in-market events.)

The film series “was certainly money well-spent. For the cost of producing a 30-second spot, we generated lots of buzz and sales,” says Linda Perry-Lube, Ford Car communications manager. Cost of the online media was “equal to a few spots on Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Mercury plans similar efforts for upcoming model launches, and keeps adding to its indy film platform.

In August, Mercury signed as sponsor of indy-film theater chain 2929 Entertainment’s Landmark Theatres, with 208 screens and 12 million fans. The two-year deal weds Mercury with the indy film industry, a key piece of Mercury’s experiential marketing strategy. The sponsorship includes screenings of Mercury-branded 10-second film bumpers before each film and 90-second branded films up to four weeks per year.

Mercury also is presenting sponsor of AOL Moviefone’s Short Film Festival and sponsors Glamour magazine’s “Reel Moments” contest that makes four winners’ essays into films.

Mercury’s multi-pronged plan holds little risk of overexposure, Perry-Lube contends. “We see [in-theater activities] as a way of reaching people throughout the year. And there aren’t a lot of product shots in Meet the Lucky Ones. We didn’t want to be heavy-handed with product placement.”

And Mercury’s unlikely to do a film contest: “It’s been done a lot and it’s fairly narrow,” Perry-Lube says.

It’s not just cars, of course. Intel Corp. is sponsoring The Intel Indies Film Contest to tout its home-entertainment technology; the contest is run by AtomShockwave Corp. in tandem with Intel ad buys on the media company’s indy film site, Atomfilms.com. Entrants submit a short film (up to four minutes) that shows what they’d do with a magic wand; grand prize is $25,000, as well as $20,000 worth of digital home equipment and screening at AtomFilms.com. Two runners-up win $10,000 each. The contest runs through Nov. 21 with winners announced in January. Entrants have to use an Intel processor during their film’s production, and can only use music from AtomFilms’ online catalog.

San Francisco-based AtomShockwave posts only about 1% of the films submitted to its site. “Just because everyone can make films, doesn’t mean that everyone should,” says VP-Ad Sales Lee Uniacke. “That’s critical for contests: We reach pros and semi-professionals as well as amateurs, which gives a contest legs and makes for interesting stuff to watch after contest ends.”

Cingular Wireless touted video phones with a first-quarter contest targeting teens and young adults. Entrants used phones to shoot 15-second films, then submitted them via MMS (multimedia message service) to vie for $5,000, a Motorola V551 phone and $500 in Cingular gift cards. (Cingular even lent video phones to film students.)