| BBDO North America: Something Completely Different |
| Media-Entertainment | |
| Written by Mike Sharkey | |
| Thursday, 31 January 2008 | |
 How David Lubars transformed traditional ad agency BBDO North America into a new media juggernaut.
In a culture where advertisers cry out for consumer attention in every medium and on every surface imaginable (do we really need those commercial-looping TVs above the john in the men’s room?), the omnipresent pitches are enough to make a person don a tinfoil hat.  The clock was ticking on magician David Blaine as he attempted to escape from this suspended trap in time to make it to Target’s two-day sale. The multimedia BBDO campaign resulted in a spike of 3 million hits on Target’s Web site and an increase in sales of nearly 6%, an all-time high.
BBDO enjoyed similar successes when it invited consumers to become an HBO Voyeur, watch the Gillette Young Guns race, witness magician David Blaine perform an escape for Target, indulge in “One Second Theater” with GE, or see an ordinary street light turn into a giraffe to promote the San Francisco Zoo. By creating non-traditional multi-platform content and events and using traditional media to invite consumers to those events, BBDO struck gold. Shoot, a leading branded content production magazine, confirmed as much when it unanimously named BBDO its 2007 “Agency of the Year.”  Scene from BBDO’s One Second Theater and Imagination Theater campaigns for GE. “The target BMW customer was very sophisticated, into technology, traveling, computer gaming, and they were early Tivo owners,” Lubars said. “Even though the world hadn’t shifted that way yet, BMW’s customer already had, and the folks at BMW realized that. They challenged us to surround the brand in ways that went beyond traditional advertising.” In response, Lubars’ team came up with BMW Films, a series of suspenseful online shorts directed by some of the world’s most popular directors and featuring the automobile manufacturer’s sleek sedans. It was a completely new advertising strategy and one of the few times in the past decade when the hackneyed phrase “thinking outside the box” truly applies. More importantly, it worked. According to BMW, 2 million people registered with the Web site, the movies were viewed more than 11 million times in four months, and sales in 2001 jumped 12% over 2000. Lubars, who speaks with the everyman candor of a character from an Elmore Leonard novel, describes the success of BMW Films succinctly: “If you have a great idea, people will love it, celebrate it, and give your client credit for it. People are grateful when you give them something nice instead of the usual shit.” Dissect the campaign, and you’ll discover the anatomy of Lubars’ creative philosophy. Instead of desperately seeking consumers, create worthwhile content consumers will appreciate and seek out on their own; embrace new media and use it as a tool to reach an audience; and make the campaign as straightforward as its title, as it was with BMW Films. There was no sinister character with a waxed handlebar mustache waiting at the Web site, ready to pounce on consumers yelling, “Ha-ha! You fell into my trap! This is an ad!” “It’s about total transparency, total honesty,” Lubars said. “We’re not trying to fool people into something they didn’t know they were doing. People know right up front it’s an ad, and they’re still into it. That’s key. I read an article recently where a cell phone company had hot girls go into bars, talk to guys, flirt with them, and then say, ‘Oh, check out my phone.’ To me, that’s the wrong way to go, the bad way on so many levels.” The right way to go in this daunting new digital world is just what BBDO was looking for. And in 2004, the agency hired Lubars to take it there. Transformer Asked to describe the organization when he arrived at BBDO’s Avenue of the Americas offices, Lubars responds in three words: meetings, meetings, meetings. Departments worked in disciplined silos and communicated with one another through an excess of meetings, making work on campaigns cumbersome and more complex than necessary. But the agency also possessed an abundance of something Lubars was anxious to tap into: creativity. “Thanks to the genius legacy of Phil Dusenberry, creativity was baked into the walls here,” he said, describing Dusenberry, who passed in December, as a visionary. “It was just a matter of directing it forward.” To direct the creativity forward, the new chief creative officer tore down the silos, did away with the meetings, and began making “a human gumbo where everyone works together in a messy kind of way, but a way that produces results that lift the entire agency higher and higher.” It was a tough sell, and not everyone was buying. Lubars found the agency split into three factions: those who embraced the new approach, those who abhorred it, and those who were willing to give gumbo a try, but preferred a more traditional dish. BBDO parted ways with those who didn’t want to or couldn’t adapt, and Lubars brought in new technologists, designers, and “left field thinkers who would not have been invited to other ad agencies.” “We have some of the most brilliant creative people I have ever met,” he said. “They grabbed the wheel, turned it, and helped move the agency in a new direction.”  Scene from BBDO’s Monster campaign. Pajama-clad people race uphill with mirrors, umbrellas, and even a satellite dish in hand in a vain effort to stop the sun from rising. “Don’t fight Monday,” Monster tells viewers.
With HBO, the reductionist nugget was simple: We’re great storytellers. From that seed, BBDO spawned a multi-media campaign that didn’t just tell consumers HBO knew how to spin a yarn, it showed them. Taking a page directly from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” BBDO put consumers in Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair and allowed them to peer in on the lives of people in a fictional apartment building. |
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