Subversiveness and Marketing a Movie

Sometimes a marketing situation calls for something subversive – a device to rouse passions of which entrenched powers wouldn't approve.

We're not talking palace-coup-level undermining of authority. Fomenting some unrest probably should do it.

A guy named Douglass recently found himself in need of a good plot. Okay, he actually already had, I like to think, a decent plot. Douglass is a character in a movie I hope to make called I Am Douglass. The script has plenty of intrigue, but we felt like the marketing needed some.

We began marketing the concept of the film before acquiring all the resources to make it. Our team adopted that approach to attract attention from actors and investors while showing them we took the off-screen side of the business seriously. We also knew that any buzz we could create now would benefit the film once it got to market.

We got off to a reasonable start. We staked out Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Vine emplacements. Friends and family provided some initial followers and we built up enough content to create an air of viability and a possibility of stickiness. Now we need to reach the next level and maybe something a little inflammatory can do it.

The movie's story revolves around two guys desperate to get somewhere safe enough to reveal explosive information they have discovered about government surveillance abuse. Many people already believe that security forces worldwide have engaged in improper spying and it really ticks them off. Ticked off people do emotional stuff like contributing to Indiegogo campaigns and buying t-shirts that say "The NSA is reading this shirt" (yeah, we have those for sale). Our target market might also like to see a movie made that would draw more attention to the subject. We've got to try to get viral with these folks.

We already put a bit of mystery into the campaign. IAmDouglass.com features a fake front page made to look like Douglass has already sent some incriminating tweets. Our first video tends toward the conspiratorial. Those, however, are self-promotional. For the anti-surveillance audience to pass around content it needs to both entertain and help them make their arguments. Our solution? Subversive cartoons.

Surveillance Lad is a superhero and a do-gooder. He helps people by watching them and helping them when he sights something amiss. In the first cartoon, he notices Mrs. Tomlinson has left the sugar out of her lemonade. He picked up on the omission while watching her via her computer's webcam. He helpfully orders her some sweetener. He deletes a teenager's ill-advised Facebook post, keeps a college student from illegally downloading music, alerts a wife about her husband's infidelity, and performs other similarly handy functions.

My 7-year old niece read a line for one of the videos. She said, "I don't want him doing that." The videos try to really cut to the bottom line : even with the best of intentions, pervasive surveillance can seem creepy. The seven videos get progressively creepier the deeper we get into the series. There's also the subtle message that no matter what level of security clearance they have, people with normal human flaws run spying installations. They aren't superheroes.

We will position the pieces as if we have uncovered a lame government PSA campaign like the ads promoting Obamacare. You know, where some 50-something suit said, "Oh yeah, the kids will love this!" Imagine if the NSA wanted to show people the ways their work could benefit the average person.

The videos will run on YouTube with support from Vine. We'll promote them however we can think of. That includes your Facebook page if you share them (thanks in advance). I've even starting creating virtual graffiti by commenting on as many surveillance news stories as I can and adding our hashtag #iamdouglass.

This issue cuts across party lines. Everybody has somebody they don't want getting into their junk. No conservative wants Dianne Feinstein listening to his phone calls and no liberal wants Dick Cheney reading her emails. So, Republicans - imagine Surveillance Lad is Nancy Pelosi. Democrats - imagine he's a Koch Brother. Koch Brothers - imagine he's anybody you want and that a huge investment in making I Am Douglass could stop him.

Come to think of it, you could maybe use a little radicalization yourself. You'll enjoy that same feeling of hellyeah you did when you came home with that tattoo your dad expressly told you not to get. Post a comment with the hashtag #iamdouglass someplace conspicuous. Don't paint it on something you don't own, but if you've got a spare barn facing a highway, why not use that extra can of paint to stick it to the man? Share a video, favorite a tweet, and if you have a friend who's a conspiracy theorist, send her our way.

Are we sufficiently inflammatory? Are we sufficiently funny? Are we Douglass? We will find out.

I Am Douglass online sites :

Website

http://iamdouglass.com

Facebook

http://Facebook.com/iamdouglass

Twitter

http://Twitter.com/iamdouglass

Google Plus

https://google.com/+Iamdouglassmovie

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/user/IAmDouglass

Indiegogo

http://igg.me/at/iamdouglass

Zazzle

http://Zazzle.com/iamdouglass

Rush Olson has spent two decades making movie-like creative products for companies, sports teams, broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

Who is this Douglass anyway?

Today, my Facebook feed is awash in cryptic posts. Someone named Douglass is either nowhere to be found, or in trouble with the FBI, or has had his name adopted by a number of my friends.

Just to reassure you, if you know someone named Douglass, he is fine. In fact, this particular guy doesn't even exist. Douglass is the title character in a movie entitled I Am Douglass. It is in the development phase, which means we are trying to come up with the means to make it. Those means include money, actors, and distribution.

As it turns out, a career full of creating commercials, advertising, and sports television in Texas doesn't necessarily introduce one to the types of folks who make films happen. As a matter of fact, those sorts of folks tend to be rather skittish about fresh faces. They may well be friendly people, but the world contains a lot more movie ideas than it does commercially viable movie ideas, and that makes such persons understandably reluctant to devote valuable time or resources to an initiative without a track record.

Of course, that doesn't stop my partners and me from wanting to make the movie. It does mean we would need to think creatively to try to make the right connections. We would need a BtoB marketing plan.

Our initial efforts involved networking, as any BtoB plan does. We gained a lot of knowledge, but hadn't been able to network our way to the types of connections we needed. So we decided to focus on the movie's brand. We saw four elements as vital to influencing our target audience : script quality, social media viability, topicality, and our businesslike outlook. If we could demonstrate mastery of those factors, we felt influencers would see our project as either capable of commercial success or worthy of becoming a passion project for them (hopefully both).

Our rollout strategy consisted mostly of social media. Social's capital costs of zero fit our low budget (although the plan includes some limited expenditures to push a handful of posts). But it fit our goals, too. The film's plot involves two men attempting to flee to a place where they can safely reveal explosive information about government surveillance overreach. The topic of surveillance certainly gets plenty of viral play worldwide, so our hope was to latch onto some of that. Both the issue and the internet transcend national boundaries, enlarging our potential audience. If you're trying to show an audience exists for an entertainment product, showing an actual large audience helps make your point.

So a social strategy could help us demonstrate topicality and social media viability (the plot contains social media elements, so that will be an important element of the final marketing mix once we have made the film). The quick-hitting nature of social posts also served our goal of demonstrating our script had quality content. We could post individual lines and plot elements to show its depth and entertaining qualities without spoiling the story.

We felt like the simple act of having a marketing plan at this stage of development would help establish some business credibility. We could also give people the opportunity to review our credentials. Those don't include blockbuster feature films, but they do include quality shorts and work for noteworthy entities like Major League Baseball teams.

We took some other steps to help ourselves look business-minded. We used trade inventory in a local weekly newspaper to promote our website (which we made to appear as if a fan of the title character had created). We created an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign targeted at pre-production, figuring we would both monetize any social buzz we created and show investors we were committed to raising money any way we could. We also started a Zazzle store selling a number of I Am Douglass items. We created videos promoting the crowdfunding initiative. We hope some of them are funny. While funds generated by crowdfunding and the store will be beneficial, those outlets, like the Twitters and Google+s, are more about providing additional ways for interested parties to interact with the brand.

We'll populate our various social media sites with content about the movie and the issue. Eventually, we hope to see the #iamdouglass hashtag show up in surveillance discussions. Once we get some critical mass of attention, we'll try to merchandise it into earned media. Media outlets that cover or comment on the surveillance issue might find our effort newsworthy.

It all adds up to a formula we hope will entice actors or investors to make inquiries about our project. They may feel strongly about the surveillance issue and believe this provides a way to stoke further discussion about it. A number of actors, like John Cusack and Janine Turner, have expressed their opinions publicly. Others, like Penn Jillette or Drew Carey, espouse worldviews that question governmental intrusiveness. We even speculate that tech companies who have lost overseas business due to NSA policies might consider backing the project as a content marketing play. 

We also hope we'll have established the proposition as a commercially viable one. The concept has appeal for several niche audiences, and the broader issue seems unlikely to disappear soon. If successful, our marketing campaign will demonstrate that the film has staying power, too.

Those cryptic posts referenced in the opening paragraph? They're how we launched the social campaign. We asked friends and friends of friends to post these cryptic messages with our hashtag #iamdouglass. We confused more than a few folks, and hopefully will have created interest for when we reveal tomorrow what it was all about. We took the same approach with our website, creating a fake front page that makes you wonder, just for a minute at least, what the heck is going on. Our pitch video, too, tended toward the conspiratorial.

Will our campaign work? We start finding out tomorrow.

Iamdouglass.com

Facebook.com/iamdouglass

Twitter.com/iamdouglass

Zazzle.com/iamdouglass

Igg.me/at/iamdouglass

Rush Olson has spent two decades making movie-like creative products for companies, sports teams, broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

Where’s the Cost-Benefit Analysis on International Ball?

The NBA offers the world’s best basketball competition in which players can play for any of the league’s clubs regardless of nationality. FIBA offers the world’s best basketball competitions in which players compete only for teams representing their countries of origin or naturalization. Because the two groups draw on much of the same player pool, injuries sustained in one competition affect the other.  Paul George’s recent mishap has led to suggestions that the relationship disproportionately favors FIBA.⁽¹⁾

That may indeed be the case and the NBA office needs to find out if it is. The league needs to perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine if the risks of endorsing international player participation outweigh the rewards. If it determines it receives more from FIBA and the IOC than it puts in, it needs to put together a really kick-butt PowerPoint to demonstrate how to its owners, since at least one loud one believes the opposite.⁽²⁾ If it determines the arrangement needs alteration, it should do it in a hurry to give any outrage a chance to die down as much as possible before the next wave of Olympic hype.

The most crucial area the NBA needs to analyze is how much benefit it derives from its international exposure and what role having its players compete internationally plays. Can we feel certain that marketing benefits flow to the NBA from inter-country games and not the other way around? The point has been made that the NBA’s ability to make money internationally skyrocketed after the Dream Team’s 1992 Olympic appearance. ⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾  While the time frame matches up to the beginning of a rise in the league’s global fortunes, measuring Barcelona’s impact is complicated by a couple of other synchronous developments. First, the Cold War had just ended. It is likely that NBA teams would have long been signing Sergei Belovs or pre-tendon-injury Arvydas Sabonises had not the players’ governments forcibly prevented such freedom of association. That related notions of “amateurism” held a certain sway didn’t help, but NBA/ABA money could have defeated those shams. Also in the early 1990s, Sky Sports launched.⁽⁵⁾ Soon, Europe would have sports-only channels to help popularize NBA games and other contests. The internet would shortly follow. Thus it is by no means clear that having pros in Olympic competition was the essential tipping point in the league’s rise in worldwide popularity. The NBA’s high level of international investment in recent years has also provided it a present-day marketing prowess that does not depend on its players wearing the red, white, and blue or the bleu, blanc, et rouge. 

The Association should also evaluate just how much its players value the opportunity to compete in their countries’ uniforms. They could attempt to monetize it in the next CBA by requiring players to make contractual concessions to participate. The NBA could also allow individual clubs to decide whether to allow their players to play internationally. Free agents could then decide if they preferred, for instance, the team that offered the most money or a team that would allow them to suit up for Scotland in the Commonwealth Games. The league could also, as Mark Cuban has suggested, simply part ways with FIBA and launch its own nation-specific tournament.⁽⁶⁾ That possibility brings us to the organization that needs to perform a cost-benefit analysis even more than the NBA.

FIBA’s bottom line reads as follows :

If the NBA forbids its players from playing internationally, FIBA will lose most of its top players. If FIBA forbids players from playing in the NBA, FIBA will lose most of its top players. Even the International Olympic Committee won’t be able to help FIBA overcome guaranteed contracts financed by a percentage of the NBA’s massive revenue pie.

FIBA may decide it doesn’t need the top players because fans will support its competitions solely because of the names on the fronts of the jerseys. If it decides instead, however, that its business model depends on having elite talent, then the organization needs to take some initiative and figure out how to make international competition into a partnership with the NBA that is sustainable. They can't risk the NBA's cost-benefit analysis showing them as anything but an asset. Maybe FIBA should be the ones to show up at the owners’ meetings with a kick-butt PowerPoint. Otherwise, they risk another Cold War – one they can’t win.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ Marc Stein, “Mark Cuban wants 'own World Cup',” espn.com. http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/11301340/mark-cuban-dallas-mavericks-feels-paul-george-renews-call-separate-quadrennial-competition (accessed August 5, 2014)

⁽²⁾ IBID.

⁽³⁾ Mac Engel, “Cuban concerned about cash, not player safety,” Star-Telegram.

http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/08/05/6019805/cuban-concerned-about-cash-not.html (Accessed August 5, 2014)

⁽⁴⁾ John Smallwood, “Mark Cuban has it all wrong,” philly.com. http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/sixers/20140805_Mark_Cuban_has_it_all_wrong.html  (Accessed August 5, 2014)

⁽⁵⁾ “Timeline,” Sky. https://corporate.sky.com/about_sky/timeline (accessed August 5, 2014)

⁽⁶⁾ Stein