_ _ _

Fifteen years in the making

PPC started talking about the WATCHMEN campaign about five years ago, when the movie was being produced by Paramount, with Paul Greengrass set to direct. I sat down with our creative director at the time and we talked through a few ideas. Guess that would have been some time in 2004.

At the heart of what we were discussing was the idea of how we could take the ‘metanarrative’ that runs through WATCHMEN – present most explicitly in the little vignettes appearing at the end of each chapter – and realise this through a range of different media, including video, print and the web.

Around the same time, Emma’s friend Kate got in touch. She was assisting Greengrass at the time, and was working on their version of the script. She’d heard that WATCHMEN had featured in my English Lit. dissertation, and wanted to get hold of a copy.

Unfortunately, I had to explain that the only hard copy of my dissertation had died with my academic career back in 1999. It was an expansive and somewhat tedious tract entitled ‘Taking Liberties: Ideas of Freedom in the Graphic Novel’ in which I examined various themes permeating what I considered to be the most significant graphic novels ever written.

This included not only WATCHMEN but also Alan Moore’s V FOR VENDETTA, Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Grant Morrison’s ARKHAM ASYLUM, many of the key frames of which were reproduced within my dissertation in glorious technicolour, harnessing the extraordinary power of a computer system residing in the Edinburgh University library.

Unfortunately, the cost of printing the bastard thing was so extortionate I had to turn a few tricks just to run off the copy I had to hand in. As for keeping a digital version, I would have needed a dongle the size of a cricket bat to take it anywhere, even if such a thing as a dongle had even yet existed.

The little I do remember about the substance of what I wrote was my focus on themes and ideas I had grown up with, living through the decade in which WATCHMEN, V and THE DARK KNIGHT all came into being – the eighties.

I examined the pervasive presence of television, the spectre of nuclear armageddon, and a growing sense of moral ambiguity ushered in by an age of scientific enlightenment, religious disenfranchisement and the emergence of the all-powerful media industrial complex (of which I am now such a loyal and trusted servant).

I found that these recurred within the significant graphic novels of the era, both in terms of narrative development, and as visual elements, framing characters existing within a menacing grey area beyond the childish binary of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.

Meaning that when Kate and I sat down and talked about how Watchmen could be adapted into a post-9/11 PG-13 superhero story, I was stumped. I was all up for trying – I’ve long ago shaken the mindset that shit film adaptations somehow compromise the integrity of the source material. As far as I’m concerned, all shit films compromise is the people who make them.

It wasn’t really working though, at least not when Kate and I were trying to get to grips with it, and the news that Paramount had pulled the plug on the project was met on my part with a measure of relief, as well as disappointment. (I’m sure with hindsight Greengrass is far happier that he went on to make his other post-9/11 project, UNITED 93.)

Fast forward to 2007, and I’m sitting in Hall E of the San Diego Convention Centre waiting for Zack Snyder to tell me and 4,999 other feverish fanboys what he has planned for WATCHMEN. I’ve travelled to Comic-con under the auspices of getting the inside track on a few of the movies slated for 2008-9, but this is the real reason I’ve routed my quarterly trip to LA through southernmost California.

It takes a certain type of person to address a crowd of 5,000 people and have each of them feel as though they’re having a one-to-one conversation. Probably the same kind of person it takes to inspire a team of hundreds, thousands even, to give themselves over to the production of a $120m movie depicting a group of men and women dressing up and ostensibly failing to save the world.

What we learned at Comic-con was that the film was set to be a period piece, that it would be R-rated, and that it would star no-one in particular. Each of these details seemed to resonate with everybody present – by the end of the session I believe every one of us shared a palpable sense that WATCHMEN was in safe hands.

_ _ _

Making it (y)our own

We must have produced more than fifty different movie widgets in the last twelve months, but the WATCHMEN widget is unique in a couple of key respects:

a) A typical movie widget goes live 8-10 weeks out from release, sometimes even less.  It’s not ideal, but movie marketing – every bit as much as politics – is the art of the possible.

The WATCHMEN widget went live ten months out.

That probably only happened because…

b) We built the WATCHMEN widget without waiting to be asked.  It wasn’t much to look at – just a countdown clock and a smiley face – but it was enough to get it signed off and get started.  When the widget went live, we were still almost 300 days from release.

(I’m looking at it now, and I’m seeing 14 hours, 39 minutes and 7 seconds.)

The key to a great movie widget is to start early, update often and seed aggressively off the back of all the major campaign milestones.

The moment the embargo came up on the teaser trailer, we had it live in the widget and were mailing around our blogger contacts to let them know that it was there for the taking.

Likewise the feature trailer, which saw Marc Berry and I up at 3am in the morning republishing files and emailing everyone we knew who might want to feature the trailer on their site.

In the background, we’ve been updating the widget on an almost weekly basis to include the steady flow of new video clips and production webisodes, campaign news, wallpapers, screensavers and all the other fanboy fare making up the backbone of any self-respecting interactive marketing campaign.

The bottom line is this – if you’re going to ask somebody to place what is essentially a free advertisement for your product on their homepage, blog, fan-site, social networking profile or whatever other digital smallholding it is they call their own, you better make sure it does something.  In the case of WATCHMEN, content-wise, we really went for the mother lode.

Coming into 2009, we took the widget and turned it into the centrepiece of what we can find no better words to describe than ’social media toolkit’.

www.I-Watch-The-Watchmen.com went live in early January, featuring a plethora – and I really mean, plethora – of tools and features.  I’m talking profile picture creators, blog, templates, site skins, social bookmarking and the rest, offering advanced compatibility with dozens of different blogging tools and social networks, as well as content created specifically for iPhone users.

I’m afraid I’m saying nothing about the number of widgets grabbed, or impressions generated, or profile pics created, unless its already out there in the public domain.  So when I say “PEOPLE LOVED THIS”, you’re just going to have to take my word for it.

_ _ _

Better blue than red, man.

Some of the ideas we pitch feel like complete no-brainers.  Others are submitted more in hope than expectation. When we sent Paramount our first pass at treatments for various 3-minute videos, each offering a different view into the world of WATCHMEN and the alternate reality in which it is situated, it never really occurred to me that several months later I’d be able to sit here and show you this…

…or this…

…or this…

[UPDATE 11:54pm 06/03/09] …or this…

…or that between them, they would be closing in on a total of one million views in less than six weeks. (The first of them, NBS Nightly News, did 200,000 views in just 48 hours.)

If it hadn’t been for the tireless persistence and imaginative energy of our creative director, Dan Skinner (a fellow fanboy, and Watchmen acolyte), I doubt these even would have made it in front of the client, let alone have gone on to become a reality.

No matter that the process of conceptualising them and co-writing the scripts was one of the most creatively stimulating experiences of my life, working or otherwise.

Nor that the time we spent designing the sets and filming the key material gave me a glimpse of what a remarkable thing it must be to spend your life working in film production.

The ultimate satisfaction is that these seem to be viewed by many as an extension of the entertainment, rather than just marketing materials. Tracking the comments online, we’ve seen a number of people mistake them for the work of the film-makers. From where we’re standing, that’s high praise indeed.

The videos are just three of the 50-odd artefacts making up The New Frontiersman, a website launched in order to explore the sprawling back-story of Watchmen with an attention to detail worthy of a Michelin star.  Like everyone, I have my own favourites, of which these are just a few:

For my money, what’s worth enjoying about The New Frontiersman isn’t the fine-looking site we developed in order to deliver the wealth of custom-created content (every item of which had to be submitted for client and film-maker approval), but the fact that Youtube, Flickr, Friendfeed and Twitter are also used to aggregate and syndicate every single item, enabling a broad audience of subscribers to pick up our daily updates by whatever means they preferred.

We weren’t just paying lip service to social media, so that we could name-check fashionable web 2.0 brands in press releases.  Everything we did with these channels was driving towards finding a broader audience for our content, using the right tools for the right jobs, building a community of common interest around the unfolding back-story.

The numbers are all there if you want to look for them – evidence not only of quantity, but also of a quality of engagement going way beyond a hit to a website, or a click-through on a banner ad.  The kind of engagement you only really surpass once you’ve got people going ten-pin bowling dressed up as Nite Owl.

_ _ _

No place like Home™

Two years ago exactly, I was sweating on an event we were running in Second Life to promote the release of Zack Snyder’s “300″.  I mean really sweating.  Working in conjunction with friend and collaborator Neville Hobson, we were inviting a number of very influential bloggers and journalists to an in-world event that had an inordinate potential to go wrong.

It didn’t go wrong.  It went off really rather well, after which I hid in an office in our building, called my wife, and broke down in tears.  It was that kind of project.

The “300″ film-maker Q&A became the starting point for a series of movie promotions in Second Life, each of which was more technically and creatively ambitious than the last, promoting movies including DIE HARD, TRANSFORMERS and IRON MAN.

PPC quickly established ourselves as peerless in the field of marketing movies in virtual worlds, which is maybe why Sony got in touch with us to talk about doing the same in PlayStation Home.

With Home going open beta in December 2008, the timing in relation to WATCHMEN couldn’t have been better.  December would see a sudden influx of many hundreds of thousands of PlayStation owners into Home, with Home cinema a likely first port of call.

We agreed to run a number of initiatives, starting with the release of the newly unveiled feature trailer in Home, making it the first trailer to play in the open beta.  This was accompanied by a video message from Zack Snyder, welcoming everybody to Home and encouraging them to look forward to more from WATCHMEN in weeks to come:

The best of what we’d learnt from our work in Second Life then came into play on the day of the UK junket, as we brought Zack Snyder and Dave Gibbons together with a worldwide audience of journalists, bloggers and fans for a 45-minute Q&A in Silverscreen clubhouse.  The Q&A was broadcast live over Ustream, opening it up to a broader audience online, and enabling us to take questions both from Ustream and from Twitter through the course of the event.

The machinima event promo gives a far better sense of what went down than I could ever hope to do:

These events tend to rely on a precarious amalgam of new technology and logistical mayhem, and can be nasty things to get caught up in the middle of.  I ran three of them in Second Life, and drank a hell of a lot of vodka along the way.

With that in mind, I hadn’t really expected to be able to just hire somebody who could just step up and take over the reins.  That’s exactly what Marc Berry did, ably supported by long-term virtual collaborator Dom from Deluxe Corporation and our metaverse consultant from across the water, Annie Ok.

The way it basically played is that with about a week to go before the event I put the fear of god into Marc, in terms of all the potential problems he was likely to face over coming days, then disappeared up north for a week on a family holiday.  I got back just in time to join the audience – virtual and actual – for a perfectly executed event.  While I’m on the record, I have to give Marc HUGE kudos for pulling it off.

The icing on the cake has been the WATCHMEN digital merchandise we’ve created and released, at no cost, through the PlayStation store.  Annie’s staple involvement in the project was to cut us a rocking machinima promo showing off the Rorschach and Nite Owl costumes we produced, and that’s exactly what she did:

Again, you’re going to have to take my word for it that these have proven popular.  The great thing about them is that, rather than spending big on producing a themed environment, something like this is relatively cheap to produce and travels through Home to wherever it is the people are.  If our approach is about encouraging fans to wear there anticipation of a movie on their virtual sleeves, and to evangelize on its behalf, our work on Home on this campaign has to be scored as a ground-breaking success.

_ _ _

The bigger picture

WATCHMEN has been a big deal for PPC Group as a whole.  As well as everything here, we’ve worked on numerous international trailers and tv spots, a 30-minute programme, a 12-part press kit and a Metro cover wrap due to hit the streets in several European countries in just a few hours time.

[Update 12:45pm 06/03/09] The cover wrap looks thus:

It’s been a chance for PPC Interactive to show exactly what it is that sets us apart from the crowd, in terms of our preparedness to innovate and experiment, whilst retaining a clear sense of the need to deliver tangible results satisfying explicitly commercial criteria.  To some extent I’ve had to ask the guys I work with – Saffron especially – to indulge me, and to forgive an almost unprofessional preoccupation with a single campaign, albeit the single most creatively aggressive campaign we’ve ever taken on.

It’s also been a chance for me to work with some of the amazing talents in my broader creative vicinity, all the way through to clients and film-makers whose preparedness to trust us with a $120m movie goes way beyond anything I’ve ever encountered.

But best of all?  Well, if you’d sat me down, fifteen years ago, and talked me through what we were going to do with this movie, the fun we were going to have, the people I’d get to work with, and the story we’d have the opportunity to tell, and then you’d told me that someone was actually going to pay me to do it, I’d have kissed you on those cherry lips of yours, and called you a liar.

I got to live the absolute dream on this one.  I don’t know what comes next, but it’s going to have to be good.  Damn good.  Because here I am.  One minute to midnight.  And it’s never felt better ≠)

Organising a blogger screening is always a far from straight-forward business.  It involves contending with, in no particular order:

1) The manifest anxiety any self-respecting film publicist instinctively experiences when confronted by the prospect of somebody writing honestly about a movie before it has been released.  (Oh, I know the critics sometimes have a go, but they also have meal tickets to worry about.)

2) The indignation bloggers often feel at being handled like the poorer cousins of journalists.  Let’s face it, most journalists are pretty poor in the first place, but at least they can rely on picking up the odd free lunch, provided they play ball (see point 1).

3) The conspicuous absence of any kind of trade body or formal qualification distinguishing a blogger from someone who just set up a blog purely in order to gain access to a free preview screening of a movie.

4) The certain knowledge that the more successful you are in attracting influential, high profile bloggers to your screening, the more fucked you’ll be if (a) it falls through at the very last minute, (b) no-one bothers to turn up on the day or (c) it doesn’t fall through, everyone turns up, and everyone thinks the movie is utterly fucking worthless.

In the case of the WATCHMEN blogger screening, which took place in Paramount International’s screening room in Chiswick Park at 10.30am this morning, these are just some of the issues we’ve faced.

A few new ones also popped up.  Notably:

i) The fact that Chiswick, for any of us who do not live there, is the middle of fucking nowhere.

ii) The fact that Chiswick Park is a business park, and that bloggers hate business parks.

iii) The fact that 10.30am on a Tuesday morning is not a time traditionally associated with watching movies.

iv) The fact that 24 hours is not a lot of notice to give a blogger in order for them to make the arrangements necessary to spend a Tuesday morning watching a movie in a business park in the middle of fucking nowhere.

With all this in mind, the roll-call in Starbucks at five past ten this morning was fairly extraordinary.  I’m talking about Mike, Gia, Lloyd, Chris, Steve, Lobelia, Nik, Derek, Rachel, Melinda, Allix, Paul, Maegan and Marie, not to mention some friends of friends and a very nice chap called David from The Times.

Within minutes of the screening ending I could see that it had divided opinion.  Not just in terms of the discussions that were taking place, but also on Twitter, where 140-word reviews quickly materialised presenting a plethora of pithy perspectives.  Take this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or, if you really must, this one.

This has carried through in the full write-ups I’ve already seen posted.  Rachel Clarke enjoyed the style and complexity, but found it excessively long and far too violent.  Paul Bay felt that it probably should have run a little longer, and found it visually stunning, but was disappointed by the anachronistic soundtrack.  And Steve Lawson, despite disliking the movie intensely, has written a very positive assessment of the event itself, exploring the benefits of taking this approach to driving conversation as part of the marketing process.

I imagine more write-ups will appear over the next day or two, so I’ll try to update this post accordingly.

Overall, the reactions I’m seeing are reminding me of working on Zack Snyder’s last movie, “300″.  It was another R-rated movie, adapted from a graphic novel, showing a huge amount of respect for the source material – too much, as far as some critics were concerned.

It was violent, and it was sexy, taking a cast of relative unknowns and asking them to deliver characters we would genuinely care about, despite the fact that we were encountering them against a backdrop of implausibly hyper-real pseudo-historical circumstance.

“300″ was released in March, around two years ago, and set some box office records in the process.  Part of its success was that it divided opinion so completely, and that this played out across a wide variety of different social channels and online media in the weeks ahead of release.

By the time “300″ came out it wasn’t enough to borrow somebody else’s opinion from the pages of a newspaper, website or film magazine – everybody seemed to want one all of their own.

On the evidence of today, here’s hoping Watchmen is set to go the same way.

We made this too.

It’s the second in the series, following on from NBS Nightly News.

It went live about half an hour ago.  Just waiting to see how it goes down.

≠)

I like.

Also…

…trying to decide which of these to wear to our next management meeting.

Your thoughts welcome.

This is an example of various WATCHMEN artwork Dave Gibbons has drawn for marketing and licensing purposes, available in a book entitled The Art of the Film: WATCHMEN. They did one for “300″, and it was rather good.

Nice to see Gibbons getting behind the movie (and, as Sizemore pointed out, paying for his retirement in the process.)

Meanwhile, somewhere near Northampton, Alan Moore crouches over a bubbling cauldron, fingering the still-warm spleen of a recently departed field mouse…

We made this.

I’ve seen a lot of different responses I’d like to quote, but the one that sticks out comes from Ain’t It Cool News, where this is, and has been for several hours, the top story:

The actual movie seems almost like it’s going to be a foot note to what’s really interesting about this whole project: a blueprint on how to use all media as a way of heightening the entire experience of a film. Not just in a phony buzz ‘Blair Witch’ style. More about using other medium to flesh out the movie in the way that just can’t be done by sitting in a theater for about two hours. Very cool.

Very cool indeed.

[UPDATED 13:30 22/01/09] That’s me selling hot dogs in the first of the vox pops btw. Technically I believe was exec producer on this project, and I probably shade a co-writing credit, but I’ll always think of myself as the hot dog salesman ≠)

[UPDATED 14:11 22/01/09] We just found someone selling Better Blue Than Red tees online. We printed up one for the kid in the clip and a few for the crew,but we never really thought about mass-producing them.  Looks like we don’t need to.

We also received word that an impromptu fan-led Better Blue Than Red A.R.G. has sprung up in one of the major forums devoted to this movie, invented and rolled out by the Watchmen superfans who make it their home, and use it to pour out their hopes and fears for this movie.  They are hardcore, and I salute them (and also fear them, just a little bit).

[UPDATED 17:00 22/01/09]We’ve been working with Annie Ok as a consultant on this project.  She really opened my eyes to what powerful community ttools Youtube and Flickr are, as well as being ok places to store photographs and video clips.

She just pinged me and pointed me in the direction of this:

It’s the top 20 most popular clips on Youtube today, in the category of News, into which we felt compelled to insert the Manhattan piece, in the name of maximum realism.  This is for the UK, but I gather the US looks much the same – a whole load of Obamas, and one Ted Philips.

At 91,000 views, with three and a half hours to go, it’s definitely looks like we’ll make six figures within the first 24 hours. If you’d offered me that this time yesterday, I’d have torn your arm off.

[UPDATE 19:15 22/01/09] Found: “New footage from the comic book movie that makes Daredevil look like a film that is somehow worse than Daredevil.”  We just hit 110,000 views, with time to spare.

This is one of the first few images to be released through The New Frontiersman.

Here’s another:

The clock is well and truly ticking ≠)

This is why. www.TheNewFrontiersman.net. It’s a site we’re producing as part of the online campaign for a certain film I might have mentioned around here once or twice before.

The New Frontiersman is a right-wing extremist publication read by the character who feels like the cold heart of Watchmen – Rorschach.

At the moment the dossier remains sealed – we’re aiming to open it up some time early next week. I’m not going to talk about the contents. I – and our client, Paramount – would much prefer to keep people guessing.

And guessing they are.

Since launching on Thursday the site has received a HUGE amount of exposure on all sorts of different movie blogs and fan sites, and is being discussed in forums all over the wilds of the web. 15,000 unique visitors in the first 24 hours isn’t bad at all from a standing start, especially for a site without any actual content.

We’re already feeling the attention. One tech-savvy fanboy went to the trouble of decompiling the flash movie and found a path to a test XML feed, referencing some random media on Flickr and Youtube – a touch careless on our part maybe, but I’m prepared to admit that even we have been caught slightly off-guard by the level of interest in what we’re doing.

I also came across speculation on one blog that the ink blot on the front of the dossier is intended to look like an evil fox, and is a deliberate dig at 20th Century Fox, who currently have Warner Bros in the courts over the question of who owns the rights to distribute this movie.

I’m happy to confirm that it’s nothing of the sort. Apart from anything else, Warner Bros and Fox are both valued clients of ours, and we’re not about to start picking sides. I guess ultimately we’re on the side of the movie, and our job is just to bring it to as large an audience as possible.

It’s also worth noting that our client on this project is actually Paramount, who are distributing the film outside the US, even though some bloggers seem to be assuming that it’s being driven by the Warner Bros team behind the campaign for The Dark Knight. That’s pretty high praise, especially considering we haven’t really done anything yet.

For anybody still in any doubt, you might be interested (as I was) to learn that the Rorschach test is actually a set of ten very specific inkblots, of which this is the first. Wikipedia reports that it’s commonly interpreted as a bat, a badge and a coat of arms.

If people are seeing an evil foxes, I guess that gives you a sense of where many of the fans and bloggers stand on the whole legal issue. Producer Lloyd Levin recently made an eloquent appeal for the studios to resolve the issue so that the release of the film could proceed unobstructed, but I’ve also seen some more incendiary analysis, reflecting how serious Watchmen fans are about seeing this movie.

So they should be.

We posted this earlier. It seems to be racking up plays already, mainly due to being picked up by PS3 Fanboy.

It probably began with a lunch at the O’Conor Don at least two years ago.  It’s exciting to be playing around with movies inside such a new space.  And, let’s face it, movies-wise this is as much as I could hope for.

The video was cut by our new ‘pr guy’, Marc Berry, who couldn’t resist taking it into iMovie and playing around.  Later on we hoping that Annie will put some pro stuff together, but for now this does the job perfectly.

Picked up an award today, and more conscious than ever that I’m working with one of the best movie marketing teams in Old London Town.  That probably sounds arrogant.  Lucky for me, it’s just a statement of fact.

I realise things may have gotten a bit WATCHMEN-centric around here of late.  Well my friends (in the non-McCain sense of ‘my friends’), get used to it.

Before you hurl forth a volley of abuse as regards the fact that the company with whom I enjoy gainful employment is a film marketing agency, and that I am exploiting this humble outlet as a medium through why to ply my occasionally worthwhile but predominantly wanton trade, I urge you to consider the following facts:

1. I wrote my university dissertation on Watchmen.  It was full of glorious technicolour plates from the graphic novel, as a result of which (a) I had to borrow the money to print the single copy I was then required to submit on the understanding that it would never be returned to me, and (b) the file was so enormous they deleted it off the University library computer system at the earliest opportunity.
2. The first password I ever used for anything internet-related was ‘watchmen’.  I still use it for things where no real security is actually required.  Like my online banking.
3. If either of our daughters had been boys, I would have pushed long and hard to name one of the Rorschach.  However, given that I can’t even get a name as orthodox as Orson past the censors (i.e. my wife), I don’t rate my chances.
4. Several years ago I attempted to buy the original twelve editions of Watchmen on Ebay.  At the time it surprised me that somebody in Malaysia should want to sell all twelve for as little as $120 USD.  They are yet to arrive.  (Co-incidentally, shortly afterwards somebody stole the rest of my money via my online banking.)
5. I LOVE Watchmen.  It is undoubtedly the greatest comic ever written, exemplifying the idea that popular culture can be both intelliegent and accessible, and exhibiting the kind of imaginative energy and intellectual curiosity that has the ability to bring colour to the panels of our otherwise monochromatic lives.

So, boring I may be, but a media whore I am not.  Not on this count, anyway.  When I come your way pimping a widget for the next Wayans Brothers movie, then you can call me a toilet trader.  And then you’ll be right.