APG Creative Strategy Awards - Eurostar 'Somers Town' by Mother London

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Last year Eurostar and Mother made a movie. Directed by Shane Meadows. With Thomas Turgoose as the lead. A warming story that made people feel good.

We learnt a lot from the experience.  About different models of brand integration.  About good and bad practice.  About where thinking should start.

And we might even have struck on a new way for brands to place themselves at the heart of a story.

For Somers Town was good, not despite Eurostar's involvement, but because of it.

And as our industry inches ever nearer the world of entertainment, we figured itíd be worth sharing our experience.

So this is the story of Somers Town. Motherís first movie.
 
Why a movie?

In 2007 Eurostar held a pitch for its advertising account. Mother lost.

The pitch brief had two parts to it.

Part one read like a normal client brief: Raise awareness that Eurostar had moved to St Pancras and convey the principal benefit of shorter journey times.

But Part two set down ambitious expectations: Eurostar's move represented a £1.2bn investment in redeveloping the terminus and regenerating the surrounding Somers Town area.

It was a huge undertaking. 

As such, Eurostar wanted its communication to befit the significance of the investment. A campaign that would leave a legacy.

A great brief, then. Bold, ambitious, lots of new-news.

And at its centre a compelling rational benefit of high speed.

But we struggled.

This was a huge building project, a slow process. Hard to capture brilliantly in 40 seconds.

But in addition we recognised there were a multitude of good things that result from the new Eurostar.

Not just high-speed linkage but a myriad of high-end benefits: wonder, anticipation, personal growth, cultural harmony and so on. These were all part of Eurostarís legacy.  There was a lot there.

Our planning training said: Precis. Prioritise. Edit. Simplify.

But our instincts kept saying, why make the legacy smaller? Why not embrace the richness of Eurostarís offering and celebrate it in its entirety?

We didnít get our heads round the problem for the pitch.

But it wouldnít go away. We couldnít fit it all into an ad. There wasnít enough time.  We wanted to express the multitude of good things that the St Pancras move promised.

But advertising is better single-minded. Furthermore advertising is too fleeting to be a long-standing mark.

We found ourselves saying "advertising" a lot. Then it dawned on us. The issue was advertising itself.

This was a problem of format.

We needed time, depth, richness, the opportunity to express a multitude of benefits. 

Across a multitude of plot lines.  Where additional layers enrich a narrative rather than obfuscate a message.

Less like an ad then. More like a movie. Which is what we went back and said to Eurostar. They took us up on it.

Rumbled. What did we know about making movies?


Learning about the movie business

So we did what all good planners do. Gather information on the market. Spot patterns. Identify good and bad practice. Infer general truths.

We learned about brand involvement in movies. We established some guiding principles.

We spoke to film buffs like Matt Bochenski at Little White Lies. Semioticians like Greg Rowland. Waded through the bible of scriptwriting, Robert McKeeís Story.

It was useful.

From our study there emerged three basic models of brand involvement in feature films.

1. Financial Placement

A sponsorship deal. The brand places money into the film project with the intention of benefitting by association.

At its best, these arrangements not only boost brand awareness but also convey good citizenship. Winning plaudits for making possible something that otherwise wouldnít have happened. The Last King of Scotland for example might not have been made without the patronage of Stella Artois.

At its worst, financial placement can tarnish both the film and the brand that financed it. Tourism Australia hoped $26m spent supporting Baz Luhrmannís Australia would effect an uplift on visitors to their shores (as Lord of the Rings had for New Zealand). But the film was widely derided as an extravagant travel brochure.

2. Visual placement

Or Product placement. Obviously the most prevalent means of brand involvement.

Done well it enriches the story.  Provides reference points for audiences, making the film a heightened expression of a reality they recognise. This has the effect of deepening viewer engagement. The trail of Reece's Pieces that Elliot deploys to coax ET. The Everlast punchbag in Million Dollar Baby.

Indeed the importance of brands in set design or as low-level props can only really be appreciated by their absence. Think of the brand-less supermarket in Repo Man. Or the fake beer brands in the Queen Vic. Distracting.

Furthermore brands can aid characterisation: the Ford Mustangs in Bullitt help convey the masculinity of McQueen's character. The foreignness of Suntory Whiskey communicates the alienation of Bill Murrayís character in Lost in Translation.

By contrast bad visual placement treats a movie like any media space. The brand buys a unit of screen time and shoehorns its way in. BMW 7 series in Tomorrow Never Dies, FedEx in Cast Away. Clumsy, heavy-handed overlay that does neither party any favours.

3. Audio placement

This model usually has the brand or its end-line referenced in dialogue. "Nice Rolex Bond." "Thanks, it's an Omega".

Obviously this works best when it just happens on set. A natural ad-lib by a great actor.

When the brand is woven into the screenplay by a decent writer, such placement can enrich a movie. The "Royale with Cheese" conversation in Pulp Fiction is one of the great exchanges in moviedom. But it doesnít always work. Stalloneís speech about Taco Bell in Demolition Man had audiences laughing for all the wrong reasons.

Audio placement can involve a sound synonymous with the brand. Like the Macbook noise Wall-E makes when he solar charges. Which was subtle and clever. Or the shriek of "Ya-hoo-oo!" as Inspector Gadget flies through a Yahoo poster. Which was less so.

Again, best practice has brands seamlessly integrate at script stage, adding texture to the film. Worst practice has brands force-fitted in, with the movie treated as no more than another medium for a commercial message.


Un-learning about advertising

So, three models then.  We applied each in turn to Eurostar.

Financial Placement
Maybe we could sponsor a second series of the Paris Je tíaime films and celebrate the romance of a key destination?

Visual Placement
The development of St Pancras would be a great backdrop to a movie. And an important part of the legacy we wanted to mark.

Audio Placement
This held less promise. Eurostar doesnít really have a famous end-line or sound effect that we could credibly weave into dialogue or action.

But, in truth, none of them were doing it for us. We wanted to make a movie because we felt it would be a richer format.  That it would allow us to be expansive and capture all the great things that the new Eurostar promised.

Yet here we were, employing classic advertising reductionism. Interrogating the brand. Breaking it into component parts. Thinking of which part could best be integrated into a film.

We weren't just thinking like ad men, we were thinking like bad ad men. Our focal point was the brand and how we'd ensure people notice it.

Where was the audience? We hadn't really considered what people might want to watch. Or why people watch films at all. Recognising this brought to mind a Russell Davies-ism:

"Nobody ever left a cinema saying, "I liked that movie, it was really clear."

Time to stop thinking like ad men. Time to stop thinking brand-out. And start thinking audience-back.


Emotional Placement

We reminded ourselves what people want from a movie.  It's not hard.  They just want to laugh. Or cry. Or scream. Or get turned on. Or all four over the course of ninety minutes.  They want heightened emotions.

They want to feel.

We recalled that whole bundle of high-end benefits we were reluctant to disentangle during the advertising pitch. They were all emotions. Wonder. Intrigue. Anticipation Escapism.  All feelings stirred by Eurostar.  This, we decided, would be the way into our film.

Weíd place these emotions at the centre of our film project and write around them.

With St Pancras as our backdrop weíd write a story about the feelings we believed the new Eurostar could in some way help evoke.

A new way in, then.   A lower-lying, deeper form of brand involvement in movies.   Not Product Placement. Not Audio Placement. 

Emotional Placement.


The Script

As material for our writers, and later the screen play author Paul Fraser, we outlined the kind of feelings we were talking about.  We spoke of intrigue, anticipation, excitement, wonder, escape and the like.

And in no particular order a basic story and set of characters began to emerge. It feels a little revisionist to tidy the magic of scriptwriting into clear steps, but for the purposes of learning, the creative process unfolded a bit like this:

We asked, who feels emotions like wonder and anticipation more viscerally than a child? From this we decided to make our lead characters kids. And use their blossoming friendship as the basic story line.

How do we capture the huge social change felt in the area as the regeneration project unfolded? We decided to make one of the kids the son of a Polish builder. He's over with his Dad whoís working on the Eurostar site.

Why would these kids dream of travel? One is a runaway, the other in a strange country.
 
And why would they want to go to Paris? Enter the love interest: a French girl in a nearby cafÈ.

Our story started to take shape.

But it really came alive when Messrs Fraser and Meadows got hold of it.


From Script to Screen

We wanted to document the cultural significance of Eurostarís arrival at a redeveloped St Pancras. We wanted a movie written not around shots of trains or scenes on platforms but around the emotions evoked by the whole project. Through the vehicle of two boysí blossoming friendship.

It was hard to see past the guy responsible for This Is England. Telling stories of the nuances of British culture with all the authenticity of a documentary? That's what Shane Meadows does.

Perhaps the best testimony to our approach on this project was it convinced him to do it. We didn't make branded content. We helped make a Shane Meadows film.


Eurostar's Legacy

Last year Somers Town won Best British Feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival. At Tribeca, Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello, jointly took best actor.

It ended up as the second highest grossing British independent at the box office.

Itís now selling in all the major DVD retailers, has already ran as VOD on Sky Box Office and, significantly, a free-to-air deal with the BBC has just been signed.

Consider this, British Airways paid Eurostar for the right to play in-flight.

Commercially then, it is already well on its way to directly paying back on Eurostarís investment.

And in making something people are willing to pay to watch, it feels like the orginal objective has been met: The move to St Pancras has indeed been marked with something of lasting cultural significance.

In addition, the ancillary contribution to Eurostar's day-to-day marketing thrust is worth noting.

The positive PR generated for Eurostar has alone been valued at £1.3 million.

A Hall and Partners survey showed that predisposition to travel on Eurostar was 40% higher amongst people who had viewed Somers Town than people who hadnít.

As Xan Brooks, The Guardians film critic put it:

ìIt's a film that made me want to travelÖ maybe to Paris, and maybe by train, a fast train under the Channel. Curse those nice feelings, that intangible stuff. Sometimes it's the most powerful stuff there is.î

This kind of goodwill can only contribute to the companyís future success.


Looking back

Itís funny really.  At the premiere, we didnít watch the film. We watched the audience. Which was how we made our breakthough during the development process.

It was only when we stopped thinking brand-out and started thinking audience-back that we identified an appropriate way for Eurostar to involve itself in a movie.

Only then that we moved beyond the conventional models of brand involvement. And found a new one.

Not Visual or Audio Placement. Emotional Placement.

And we think there might be something in this. We might even try it on our ads.  Maybe then we might stop losing pitches.

View all the other APG Creative Strategy Award finalists