Living It Up

During last year's Summer Olympics, TBWA creative director John Merrifield promoted Adidas by hanging climbers from the sides of 33-story buildings in Tokyo and Hong Kong so they could race a vertical 100-meter sprint. The winning racer took home $10,000. The year before, he and his team hoisted two acrobats 12 stories above ground to play vertical soccer on giant Adidas billboards in downtown Tokyo and Osaka. As word spread and he racked up awards, Merrifield found that not all his e-mail was congratulatory. Many ad folks teased him for ruining their life, he recalls. "Their response was like, 'You bastard! Just got out of a client meeting and all they talked about was vertical this and vertical that ... thanks a lot, mate, you really dropped me in it big time. Now what am I gonna do?'" Merrifield says with a chuckle.Merrifield's ambitious Adidas work was a big step in validating the notion of live stunts as legitimate marketing. Part theater and part circus, live ads are beginning to enjoy some of the same popularity in the U.S. as they have in Europe and Asia. Some U.S. live ads are designed as vertical billboards high above the clamor of the street, such as Target's vertical fashion show in July (pictured above). Others are staged at street level for a more interactive consumer experience, such as Yahoo!'s Santa Claus in a snow globe in Times Square last fall.Since live ads are not yet an established category that is measured on its own, it is difficult to count them. But there are clues. The growth rate of outdoor ad spending—the category that many live theatrical projects fall into—is accelerating. Overall outdoor ad spend rose 9 percent in the first half of 2005, to $1.7 billion, compared to the first half of 2004, according to TNS Media Intelligence. The growth rate from the first half of the previous two years was 5 percent, followed by 4 percent. Officials at the Outdoor Advertising Association of America report they are fielding significantly more calls this year from marketers looking for ideas for living billboards and other forms of theatrical marketing. John Yost, former partner at Black Rocket, is turning to live marketing in his new role as CMO at Oakville Grocery, an upscale chain in northern California. To launch the company's newest market, Yost is producing a giant one-day picnic in San Francisco on Sept. 29. He is working with Mixed Marketing, the agency that orchestrated Calvin Klein's three-story perfume-bottle stage in Times Square last July. For the Oakville Grocery event, a 10,000- square-foot red-checked picnic blanket will be spread across the courtyard at the Cannery shopping center in San Francisco. Reps in branded aprons will give away 2,000 picnic baskets with lunch items and picnic invitations around the city. During the noon hour, a swing band will entertain picnickers and passersby. Taxi wraps and bus shelter ads will promote both the giant picnic and the new store. Yost describes the effort as "poor man's TV." "It gets the brand out there, it entertains and surprises people and it's a third of the cost" of a regional broadcast buy, he says.Done well, live ads are cheaper than traditional print or TV work and can generate as much or more attention. But because their success is dependent on outside forces, the risks are high. Bad weather, major news events, uncooperative government officials and competing stunts can easily derail them. For instance, Düsseldorf, Germany-based Esprit spent months planning a vertical fashion show to be presented in Manhattan in September and then canceled it after the similar Target event and Hurricane Katrina. Bad timing was not the main reason, says representative Jamilyah Smith-Kanze, who declined to elaborate.Generally, the success of marketing events is measured by the number of people who pass by and the amount of media coverage. Some events also are tied to specific sales promotions or online activities that can be measured. Costs for live ads vary widely, from $100,000 to nearly $1 million, with most live ads on the lower end, say sources. For instance, a vertical fashion show runs $250,000 to $300,000, not counting music, lighting or TV cameras, says New Berlin, Wisc.-based GMR Marketing. According to TBWA, the Adidas soccer billboard cost approximately $180,000 and generated about $150 million worth of free publicity worldwide. The price tag for the Adidas vertical sprint events was just under $1 million and generated about $50 million worth of free publicity. Those publicity figures do not include the thousands of people who saw the ads in person. At the Calvin Klein event in Times Square, an estimated 1.1 million people saw the living billboard from the street, and publicity generated more than 155 million media impressions in 12 countries, according to Video Monitoring Services and Burrell's clipping service. That doesn't include mentions on Web sites and blogs. During the event, field reps passed out thousands of fragrance samples and collateral. At the same time, a nearby Macy's ran the CK One TV ad on its Jumbotron. Product sales at that Macy's on the day of the event were up almost 370 percent compared to the same day the year before. Sales for the week were up 100 percent compared to the year-ago period. "Ad campaigns come and go," says Daniele Cardelia, vp of public relations at Calvin Klein. "We wanted something that was creative and innovative and upheld the look and feel of the brand. As it turned out, the PR we generated was beyond our expectations."There is a "mystique" to a theatrical event, says Jim Lawrence, Best Buy event marketing chief. "It's a passing moment in time," and people who see it talk about it with others, he says. The electronics retailer introduced its Geek Squad by putting a live "Geek in a Box" on busy sidewalks around the country in summer 2004. And it intends to use 100 actors in a new Geek Squad ad event at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January, he says.Advertisers have "a bigger appetite for attention-getting projects" than in the past, says Jim Poh, Crispin Porter & Bogusky's director of creative content distribution. Clients are more willing to put out the effort and accept the risks "because they see that people talk about these events and hear about them on Leno." He says his agency has staged public events for former clients Ikea and Mini Cooper, and considers street theater a useful part of the marketing mix. "You can make more content out of the theatrical event by filming it for a TV spot or using it in promotional leaflets," he says.So far, few agencies in the U.S. are specialists in this type of work. The ringleaders tend to be public-relations, event-marketing and media specialists who often have past advertising experience. Along with TBWA's first Adidas stunt, the living billboard idea started picking up steam two years ago when Target subsidiary Marshall Field's and GMR Marketing wowed Chicago shoppers with a fashion show down the side of the Marshall Field's building. Target, which has since sold Marshall Field's, hired some of the same Munich athletes who performed in Chicago to dance down the side of a building in Rockefeller Center for its vertical show this summer. Another early example was Yahoo!'s date-on-a-billboard in January 2004. It promoted its online personals by putting real-life Yahoo! user Julie Koehnen on a billboard stage on Los Angeles' Sunset Boulevard. For three days she used her computer to find a date, underwent beauty treatments to prepare for the date and met her chosen man, all in public view and with constant media interviews. This holiday season, Yahoo! will revive the reality-TV approach in a live ad promoting its holiday shopping services, says Linda Bennett, senior director of buzz marketing at Yahoo!. The challenges of live ads are both obvious and subtle. Practitioners agree the hardest part is getting necessary permission and permits from building owners, tenants, local governments, police and fire departments. The Calvin Klein project required about 100 hours of negotiations over five months to get approvals from city agencies, engineers and the Landmarks Preservation Commission, says Luanne Calvert, founder of Mixed Marketing. Because PR determines the success of a live ad, novelty and originality are crucial. And like all ads, the message and the tone of the event should reflect the essence of the brand. But there are other key elements, say the pros. Calvert, who started her career in the early 1990s in the media department at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, says when your medium consists of people passing through a public place, "you have to get over the notion that if you build it, they will come." They won't. According to Calvert and other insiders, an effective live ad should offer most or all of the following components: It should be entertaining, particularly humorous; tap people's curiosity; offer a good deal, preferably something free; and finally, be tied to a good cause, such as a popular charity. For example, Oakville Grocery will donate baskets to the local food bank.To keep its edge, street-theater-as-advertising will have to grow beyond acrobats hanging off of buildings. Events like the picnic, in which performers and the audience interact, are one direction live events are taking. Other variations are larger-scale productions and the introduction of celebrities. Compared to conventional marketing, crafting live ads is liberating and exciting. But it can also be nerve-racking, says GMR's Joe Sutter, who worked at a small ad and design shop early in his career. "You just don't have the control you have with a traditional ad campaign. Every event, it's like watching the Flying Wallendas."

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Living It Up

Joan Voight

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Joan Voight