The Integration Initiative: Special Ops Media Gives Entertainment Marketing a Full-Service Facelift
Well, you guys seem to have said strategy and what it takes to be an integrated agency in check.
C: Looking at our evolution, Jason and I used to always kid around about the structure of our company. We would look at comparable agencies, whether it’s an AKQA or an Avenue A. We always wondered, and I’m not specific to those companies on this comment, but the evolution of our business was always so natural. It was always so obvious, like if we’re in this business, why wouldn’t we be in this business. Obviously, we only get into new business that we think will complement our existing businesses, and that we feel we have competitive advantages in.
In a general comment about the structure of our agency, we are able to handle a fully integrated campaign, strategy, execution and report for a client. I think that what came to us naturally, you see these other companies having these Eureka ideas like, ‘we’re going to group creative media.’ It’s like, of course, why wouldn’t you? There are obviously structural and historical constraints that make that a Eureka moment for some of the larger agencies. For us, it’s a key competitive advantage. You have agencies that are building creative units with no eye towards media. They are delivering creative units that may or may not work.
But when you’ve got an agency that’s building creative units where the media team is involved from day one, helping with the messaging, helping with the branding…
J: And where the promotions and publicity team is talking to the editor of a site about sending over the huge content future.
C: The probability of success and integration in that campaign is substantially higher. With us, I think you have a much more seamless integration than most other ocmpanies given our size, our structure and our hierarchy. But you also have all the benefits of those being under one roof where those key learnings are applied and shared. That continues to surprise me as I look at the structure of other companies and wonder, why wouldn’t you put these together or why you wouldn’t be in these businesses?
Tell me about some of the campaigns Special Ops has been involved with in recent years, like the online execution for Brokeback Mountain.
J: We did all the media, publicity, strategy and research. On the DVD side, we did e-cards. Literally, it was a year-and-a-half long campaign that started with just researching buzz of people when it was just announced it was going into production. People were saying ‘gay cowboy movie’ and all this stuff. Taking it from this total “who knows where this is going to go” [film] to an award-winning film and an unbelievable campaign, we did some things that were a little bit out of the ordinary. But at the same time, we were really just giving it legs and getting people to give it a shot, see it and understand it as more than a “gay cowboy movie.”
Was that one of the most challenging campaigns you guys had to deal with?
C: It was challenging more because we were dealing with a great product. When you have something that’s underlying and so strong, the challenges were how we get this out and how do we gain acceptance for something that has applicability so far beyond this snap judgment to call it a gay cowboy movie. In that sense, it was so rewarding and so interesting to see how to do that. So many issues came with it. You had preconceived notions of the film, you had people looking to just categorize it, and you had all sorts of buzz. We really worked with [Focus Features] very closely and really managed that well to get it out there so that people could judge for themselves.
It was a real collaborative effort. Different players would all be putting ideas on the table and reacting. I don’t want to sit here and try to take credit for that. It was very much a group effort over an 18-month period. We started out talking about marketing [Brokeback] to Middle America, marketing to families and soccer moms, and really going in between the coasts. In New York, LA, San Francisco, and urban areas, absolutely we got it. But how do we take this to Missouri, and I think we did it.
J: I actually think another [campaign] that was very challenging was for An Inconvenient Truth. That was incredibly challenging. You could look at it and say this is a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation from Al Gore. It really is, but there’s obviously much more to it. But that campaign, and because also the budget was incredibly small, what we had to work with was incredibly challenging. You watch this movie and say, “how are we ok with the world we’re living in and the direction we’re going?”
But to get people in the theaters initially without anyone having seen it and being so abundantly clear on how important it is to you, we did everything from research all these politically active bloggers, environmentalists, everyone. It was very much a grassroots—everyone uses that term for a thousand different things—but for this, it was really really one-to-one, finding these active spokespeople in these special interest categories, getting them to see it, getting them to champion it, and tell their readers why this is important.
Then, once you got this initial groundswell, where you see it and are like, how do I not act on this, we were able to do is we were doing it in a medium where people could immediately post things like “this is incredible,” “this is what you could do to reduce your carbon emissions” and all these really simple things that were easy to pass along in that environment.
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