Case Study: BMW’s “The Hire” Ad Film Camapaign

BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft) is one of the world’s leading luxury carmakers.
Founded and based in the Germany, BMW group employed over 100,000 people, making and distributing a
series of successful, premium-priced passenger cars and motorcycles. In addition to its manufacturing
operations, BMW also provides financial services to support its worldwide sales and distribution of cars and
motorcycles.

BMW was initially established to build aero engines during the First World War. By 1945, company was still
country’s leading aero engine manufacturer. But by 1928, BMW has also started making cars, when it got the
license. It was later when BMW became one the biggest automobiles maker in Germany. But after the Second
World War, company was laid into ruins. The demand for aero engines subsequently disappeared. Its
factories and other capital equipment, which were located in area now controlled by Soviets, were under
serious threat. At this point of time company was not sure about its future and started concentrating on
automobiles production. But in 1959, company went into financial turmoil, when it faced bankruptcy. In this
hard time, company found a savior in the face of Herbert Quandt, who emerged as a powerful share holder by
taking over the 50% share of the company. In BMW group’s history the turning point was 1961, when it
launched BMW 1500, which soon got BMW brand, the reputation of an excellent engineering company. Now a
day, BMW enjoys the ownership of three quality brands, BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce motor cars.

In 2000 BMW posted total sales of $33 billion, a slight decrease from its 1999 earnings of $34 billion. Afraid of
further backsliding, the Bavarian automaker decided to reshape its advertising to better target the Internet-
savvy BMW customer. Before 2001 the company’s advertisements had typically consisted of product-driven
campaigns with immaculate BMWs clinging to mountain roads. BMW asked its longtime advertising
partner, Fallon Worldwide, to create something different. In 2001 five action-packed short films emerged
under the campaign title ‘‘The Hire,’’ which became one of the most acclaimed campaigns in advertising
history.

Three different BMW/Fallon campaigns preceding ‘‘The Hire’’ had mostly consisted of ‘‘hard-driving, product-
focused efforts designed to show what it’s like behind the wheel of a BMW,’’ Jim McDowell, vice president of
marketing at BMW North America, told Advertising Age. BMW and Fallon felt their campaigns’ flavor had
been so overused by competitors that the original uniqueness had washed out. Wanting to launch a more
unprecedented campaign, BMW asked Fallon for something new, but Fallon’s creatives felt confined within
the restraints of traditional television spots. They wanted to show BMWs for longer periods of time and to
truly push BMW’s performance to the point of damaging the car, which was something unheard of for a car
commercial. ‘‘In response to our plea,’’ Bildsten said in an interview with Shoot, ‘‘[BMW] sent us this letter
that was just amazing. They were telling us, ‘Take off the gloves. Do whatever you want. We want you to really
stretch.’ ’’ After finishing a Timex campaign that included the use of video clips in Internet advertising, David
Carter and Joe Sweet, two of Fallon’s art directors, were eager to try different filming techniques. ‘‘One night I
challenged [Carter and Sweet] to come up with something cinematic,’’ Bildsten told Brandweek. ‘‘They came
back the next morning with the whole idea almost completely worked out.’’ When they took it to BMW, ‘‘it
took us about 30 minutes to present and 10 seconds for them to give us a green light.’’

After working with BMW to develop the idea of a James Bond-type hero who drove various BMWs, Fallon
enlisted David Fincher’s film-production company, Anonymous Content. Fincher then successfully wrangled
some of Hollywood’s biggest guns to create the five short films. Three more films were created in 2002 to
promote BMW’s new Z4 roadster. All eight starred Clive Owen as the ‘‘hired’’ driver who found himself
driving a BMW in every spot. ‘‘The Hire’’ was promoted much like a feature film would have been, with movie
trailers, print ads, and Web ads.
Short subplots, which loosely linked the campaign’s first five storylines, were filmed quickly, and with a
digital video camera, by Ben Younger and Director of Photography William Rexer. The filming of one scene,
which looked like a real-life occurrence to most onlookers, involved a ‘‘car thief’’ slamming a ‘‘hit man’’ onto a
car hood in New York. ‘‘Some of the reactions I got from people who weren’t real extras were so good that we
had to hunt people down [to get permission to include them in the films],’’ Younger said in an interview with
Shoot magazine. ‘‘I loved the reaction of one armored-car guy, so we paused the frame, took down the name
on the side of the truck, and called the company to get a waiver from him.’’

Since its launch “The Hire”has been singled out as the first high profile, big-budget, celebrity-laden Internet
marriage of advertising and entertainment. It has been reviewed, scrutinized, deconstructed and cited as
evidence of the perilous future for traditional advertising. New York Times film critic (Elvis Mitchell) called
the series “a marriage of commerce and creativity, straddling the ever-dwindling line between arts and
merchandising.” BMWFilms is simply the latest and possibly the hippest Web site to make use of streaming
video in order to lure prospective customers. Fast cars, mysterious passengers, Buddhist monks, rock
superstars, and sinister enemies are all part of the film series, which are presented in installments by some of
Hollywood’s top directors. These films are being advertised on television the same way that movie trailers are
advertised; the difference is that instead of the catch phrase “coming soon to a theater near you,” this catch
phrase reads “see it only on BMWFilms.com.”

The five initial films cost an estimated $15 million, and the three made in 2002 cost about $10 million. ‘‘The
Hire’’ catapulted BMW’s exposure into film festivals, awards shows, and even an exclusive BMW DirecTV
channel. By 2002 BMW sales were up 17 percent, while some of its competitors, such as Volkswagen and
General Motors, floundered. By June 2003 more than 45 million people had viewed the films, overshooting
the original goal of reaching 2 million viewers. ‘‘The Hire’’ garnered numerous ad industry awards. The
campaign’s final spot, ‘‘Beat the Devil,’’ aired November 21, 2002.

Advertising Strategy

Initially, Fallon and BMW had decided to film one serialized 45-to-60-minute film featuring a suave hero who
saved, kidnapped, and escorted people using different BMW models. Fallon approached production company
Anonymous Content, headed by David Fincher (director of Se7en and Fight Club), to produce the film. Fincher
recommended that the spots be broken into five different films in order to facilitate file downloading and
allow more flexibility in attracting talent to work on the project.

Following Fincher’s advice, Fallon developed scripts for five short films. In producing ‘‘The Hire,’’ Fincher and
Fallon went so far as to create a dossier, complete with FBI and CIA files, just to flesh out the films’ hero.
Fincher then solicited some of Hollywood’s top directors. The final list included Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon), John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate), Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express), Guy
Ritchie (Snatch), and Alejandro Gonzá lez Iñ á rritu (Amores Perros). The scripts, ranging from dark to
hilarious, were distributed according to each director’s style. Anonymous Content chairman Steve Golin told
Shoot, ‘‘The good news is that these weren’t commercials. We had very few restrictions. The budgets were
equivalent to [those of] high-end commercials.’’

Fallon flipped the advertising equation upside down by spending 90 percent of its budget on production and
only 10 percent on media. The reduced media expenditure was initially seen as a huge risk. According to
Advertising Age’s Creativity, a BMW rep warned Fallon, ‘‘Either nobody will notice, or this will be a smashing
success.’’
For each of the six-to-seven-minute films, subplots were also created in an attempt to weave the film
storylines together. British actor Clive Owen, whose character became the common thread for the entire
campaign, always played the skillful hired driver. Frankenheimer’s ‘‘Ambush,’’ the campaign’s debut film, first
became available for download on BMWfilms on April 26, 2001. It featured the hired driver saving a diamond
smuggler from machine-gun toting assailants in a cargo van. Fallon released each of the following four spots
every two weeks. Typical Hollywood methods, including broadcast spots, billboards, and free posters, were
used to promote the films. Print ads ran in Hollywood trade magazines Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly,
and Rolling Stone. The trailers for ‘‘The Hire,’’ resembling regular movie trailers, aired on VH1, Bravo, and the
Independent Film Channel. One of Fallon’s biggest challenges was to pitch the films as entertainment but to
still disclose BMW’s involvement. ‘‘We wanted to avoid the ‘microbrew syndrome,’’’ Bildsten explained to
Brandweek, ‘‘like where you look down and see that [your beer] was actually made by Anheuser-Busch.’’ ‘‘The
Hire’’ was also uniquely filmed to fit computer screens. ‘‘No one had ever done an internet project of this
magnitude, and we had a lot to learn,’’ Fallon producer Robyn Boardman told Advertising Age’s Creativity.
‘‘There are different things to keep in mind when shooting for the web. File size, for starters, and the fact that
wide shots don’t play well.’’

Due to overwhelming Web traffic, ad-industry praise, and BMW’s bottom-line success in 2002, a ‘‘second
season’’ consisting of three films began airing October 24, 2002. The second crop involved an equally
renowned roster of names. Instead of Anonymous Content, all spots were produced by Ridley Scott (director
of Blade Runner and Gladiator), who recruited directors Tony Scott (Top Gun), John Woo (Face/Off ), and Joe
Carnahan (Narc). The actors included Gary Oldman, James Brown, Don Cheadle, Ray Liotta, and of course,
Clive Owen, returning to star in the final three films. The last of the films was released at the end of 2002.

Target Audience

‘‘The Hire’’ largely arose from Fallon and BMW’s growing concern that past campaigns had been missing the
company’s target audience: well-to-do, high-achieving males who usually researched purchases using the
Internet and lacked the time to watch network television. Research showed that consumers inclined to
purchase BMWs were also broadband-connected, tech-savvy males and that 85 percent of this population
studied BMW’s cars online before even stepping into a showroom. As far as whom the campaign would appeal
to, McDowell explained to Advertising Age, ‘‘We would have guessed that our central tendency would have
been 25-year-olds, but actually from our early measurements we got people older and more affluent than
that.’’ Knowing that the mature target audience was keener on the viewing experience than on the interactive
experience, Fallon purposely avoided using gaming software on the campaign’s website. To study the
effectiveness of ‘‘The Hire,’’ BMW and Fallon devised units of measurement called ‘‘BMW minutes,’’ which
calculated how much time viewers spent with the new Internet campaign compared to previous television
campaigns. ‘‘We were astonished to discover that a major fraction of the total BMW minutes were Internet
minutes,’’ McDowell told Advertising Age. Males made up 68 percent of the viewers, 42 percent of whom
came from households with incomes greater than $75,000. The second suite of ‘‘The Hire’’ films featured
BMW’s new Z4 roadster, which aimed at a demographic that could hopefully afford them. In late 2002 BMW
began running its eight films on an exclusive BMW channel for DirecTV. The channel, which was available for
a limited time, interspersed the films with behind the-scenes footage and special ‘‘subplot’’ spots.

Competition

Mercedes-Benz, the German luxury arm of Daimler Chrysler, was the top-selling luxury brand in the United
States in 1999, a position it maintained until losing ground to BMW and to Toyota’s Lexus in 2002. For the
same year’s first 10 months Mercedes units sold dropped by 1,500, losing out to BMW’s incredible 17 percent
sales growth that year. ‘‘Mercedes has been improving its quality but it hasn’t been keeping pace with the rest
of the U.S. industry,’’ Brian Walters, director of quality research at J.D. Power and Associates, explained to
Bloomberg News. In an attempt to reproduce BMW’s campaign success, Mercedes’s London-based ad agency,
Campbell Doyle Dye, faked a movie trailer for a supposed upcoming film called Lucky Star. Never admitting to
be just an advertisement, the movie ‘‘trailer’’ broke in U.K. movie theaters July 4, 2002. Lucky Star pretended
to be the next release from producer Michael Mann (The Aviator, Collateral) and portrayed Benicio Del Toro
as a man acting independently to clean up Chicago’s commodities exchange. The spot periodically showed Del
Toro masterfully speeding through Chicago in a $90,000 Mercedes 500 SL.

Toyota Motor Corp’s Lexus luxury division rose up to be the luxury-car industry leader, selling more units
than BMW or Mercedes in 2001. Besides the sales success, Lexus dominated as the most reliable in its
industry; according to J.D. Power and Associates, Lexus cars had fewer than half of the problems, after four
and five years, that the average cars and trucks had. In 2001 Lexus decreased its ad spending. By 2002 the
carmaker’s ad agency, California-based Team One Advertising, had focused its efforts on the remodeled
ES300 sedan.

1. Explain the Outcome of Ad Campaign and highlight key elements.

‘‘The Hire’’ raked in a plethora of advertising awards, including two Grand Clio Awards and a Grand Prix
Cyber Lion at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France, along with Best of Show at the One
Show Interactive competition. The campaign was praised not just by the ad industry; it earned kudos within
the entertainment arena as well. ‘‘Hostage,’’ from the second series of films, earned the award for Best Action
Short during the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival in 2002. Entertainment magazines began
reviewing the films. Even the New York Times gave the films a favorable review. Their entertainment value
garnered media coverage not accessible to typical advertisement. ‘‘We’d hoped for a good response, but we
never thought it would be as strong as it was,’’ Bildsten told Shoot in 2001. ‘‘BMW recorded over eleven
million film-views. And according to their research, it really worked. [The films] got people to not just pay
attention, but to buy cars.’’ By June 2003 the films had been viewed more than 45 million times. BMW’s sales
rose 17.2 percent between 2001 and 2002, helping the automaker to outsell Mercedes and placing it second
only to Lexus in the luxury-car market. From an ad industry perspective, the greatest pinnacle of ‘‘The Hire’’
may have been winning the first-ever Titanium Lion, the highest honor at the Cannes International
Advertising Festival. The award recognized a campaign that caused ‘‘the industry to stop in its tracks and
reconsider the way forward.’’

Reference: Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns. Thomas Riggs