Brief
Emirates approached roster agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine in mid-2008 with details of new summer routes from Dubai to cities on the west coast of America, including Los Angeles. The brief was to capture the imagination of consumers on both sides of the Atlantic, and to promote the first direct flights between Dubai and LA. Tom Bazeley, managing partner of Lean Mean Fighting Machine, says it is rare in digital marketing to receive such a simple brief without the brand demanding multiple messages, format restrictions and ad serving preferences.
Pitch
Lean Mean Fighting Machine created two concepts. One, which only targeted the audience in Los Angeles, was dropped in favour of a global approach. The winning concept was LA Premiere, which involved the creation of a short film, the first showing of which would coincide with the inaugural Emirates flight's arrival in LA.
The film would be unique in that it would be filmed with no actors. Instead, members of the public could audition and feature in the end product after filming had been completed, by using webcam technology.
Bazeley says Emirates liked the prospect of having a campaign and website involving people from all over the world, as it reflected the company's transformation from a Middle-Eastern airline to a global brand. "It definitely wasn't a rushed decision," he says. "We trialled the technology and made a demo version with some people from the office, which made it easy to imagine what the film might be like. But the concept wasn't too tough to sell."
Creative
The short film, The Exposure of Tom King, is a Hollywood-esque caper in which the eponymous protagonist gets blackmailed by a couple of opportunists who discover he has a secret.
Bazeley explains that the film was shot on location in LA, with no people in it. "We developed a piece of technology that allowed us to create the world's first user-generated film: a webcam application that cuts and pastes the user into a scene," he says. "It took a hell of a lot of work to get it right. We knew it was possible, but it took a huge amount of tweaking, retesting and refining to get it to the point of usability."
Auditions were conducted from living rooms around the world, and the final film featured members of the public acting together in the same scenes without having met one another. Casting director Avy Kaufman, who has worked on box-office blockbusters such as Brokeback Mountain, The Sixth Sense and The Bourne Identity, was recruited for the casting.
Media plan
Starcom and Bigmouthmedia were briefed on the idea and charged with planning and implementing a media strategy that would generate auditions, drive people to watch the auditions, and then promote the online premiere of the film.
Advertising slots were booked on suitable sites focusing on the core markets of California and Dubai, as well as those catering for southern Europe and India.
Launch
Online advertising and PR were central to the first phase of the Emirates campaign. The empty film and accompanying script were streamed online through an MPU, which encouraged people to visit a website where they could watch the film, read about the characters and decide if they wanted to audition.
Each audition was vetted by the agency team and, after being given the thumbs-up by Kaufman, was streamed online via an MPU that allowed people to select which character they wanted to view. The audition clip also appeared in the gallery section of the website created for the campaign.
Over the course of three weeks in October, 700 auditions were submitted by wannabe actors from all over the world, but only 200 were deemed to be of decent enough quality to feature in the campaign.
"The reason so many got knocked out was either an issue of quality or acting ability, or they were quite plainly weirdos who shouldn't be allowed any kind of publicity at all," says Bazeley.
After the final film cast was selected by Kaufman, the participants were contacted and briefed on how to shoot their scene and deliver their lines. The characters were then dropped into the empty film individually to create the finished piece.
The premiere of The Exposure of Tom King took place in a movie theatre at a secret location and was streamed live through the website.
"We could have premiered the short film just by making it available on that day, flicking a switch and posting it on the website, but we thought it would be more fun and much more interesting to have a live, recorded premiere, so that the audience could watch it live or at a later date," Bazeley explains.