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This is another example of how advertisers are always adapting to new media and finding novel ways of exploiting old media
Yesterday, we told you about Cellular, the longest and perhaps least expensive "commercial". Now read about a TVC which runs for 3 minutes and cost the advertiser a jaw-dropping €27 million, or approximately Rs 159 crore.
The ad stars Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman and is directed by Baz Luhrmann of Moulin Rouge fame. And, the advertiser is lifestyle brand, Coco Chanel.
People who have seen the creative are confused. At €27million, is it a film or is it the world's most expensive advertisement?
"It's a film, not an advert," Chanel maintains. The visuals are indeed arresting. The creative opens with Kidman (playing the "most beautiful and most famous woman in the world") rushing swan-like into the frame. She is being pursued by paparazzi in a cityscape lined with billboards bearing her image. As the cameras close in, Kidman ducks into a taxi to escape. "Drive," she says, breathless and desperate, before turning to notice a sultry Brazilian beside her.
The three-minute movie 'No 5: The Film' is "a creative first," explains Chanel, "the film to revolutionise advertising." Made at an expense of Rs 159 crore in Indian currency terms, it is certainly a first in terms of budget. Kidman alone took a €3 million fee for the five-day shoot.
The film differs from a traditional advertisement in many respects. Unlike the Nokia phone in Cellular, there aren't any shots of the fabled perfume bottle. The only reference to the perfume is a neon double-C sign (Coco Chanel) and a pendant made of 687 diamonds in the shape of a No. 5 that hangs down Kidman's back at the end of the promotion.
The film certainly bears the hallmarks of a Hollywood film. It is beautifully shot on high-gloss celluloid, has costumes designed by Karl Lagerfeld and a score by Debussy.
Luhrmann is not the first mainstream Holloywood auteur to direct an advertisement. Earlier examples include Michael Mann, the director of Heat, teaming up with Benicio Del Toro for Mercedes-Benz in 2002, and Anthony Minghella, the director of The English Patient, directing a television campaign for Guinness. Even the great Sir Alfred Hitchcock had 'sullied' his art for the adman's penny.
As for Chanel, its latest effort is in continuation with tradition, set in the 1950s. Chanel, synonymous with Hollywood glamour (like Lux is to apna Bollywood) had its first coup in 1954, when it was allied with Marilyn Monroe. Monroe had claimed, with outrageous seductiveness, that all she wore to bed were: "A couple of drops of Chanel No 5." Later, Chanel continued the trend with Catherine Deneuve, Ali MacGraw and Carole Bouquet.
The global ad industry is searching for reasons to explain why Chanel has done this advertisement. One view is Chanel has gone to such lengths out of desperation to reposition No 5. "Its image has slipped. It might be one of the biggest-selling scents in the world, but it's considered to be the scent you buy your mistress in the airport, or your grandma for her birthday. In short, it has lost its allure," commented one executive.
This is another example of how advertisers are always adapting to new media and finding novel ways of exploiting old media. Commenting on the ad, Grey Global Group's Carolyn Carter was reported as saying: "Every target group is becoming more resistant to traditional advertising methods. So, brands have to look at different ways to move people. This is evidenced in the migration to other strategies like product placement in films, direct marketing and sponsorship."
Coming back to the narrrative of the film, Kidman is suitably smitten by Rodrigo Santoro, who plays the bohemian intellectual, in the back of the taxi. In Luhrmann's words, Santoro is "a young Gabriel Garcia Marquez", who lives on the Lower East Side of London, reads Shakespeare, plays a guitar and types on an old-fashioned Olivetti.
Santoro's character doesn't know who Kidman is and she lies, telling him: "I'm a dancer."
To the strains of Debussy's Clair de Lune, the couple have a rollicking time on Santoro's rooftop garret, backdropped by an enormous double-C logo.
After four days, Kidman's secretary appears as the proverbial kebab-mein-haddi (a party pooper) in their bedroom. "You must return to the all-important event tomorrow," he tells Kidman, in faintly menacing tones. And so she does, emboldened, to face fame once again on life's red carpet. Santoro is left wistful, remembering only "her kiss, her smile, her perfume".
© 2004 agencyfaqs!