Don't Like That Video? Tell the Characters How to Change

Viewers have been expressing their opinions for decades about what they liked and didnt concerning TV shows, movies and videos. Usually, however, they were talking to themselves, bored colleagues or eye-rolling family members.

But interactivity is here. Don't like something? Change it!

This is the logical next step in the ever increasing self-propelled media bubble individuals are being encouraged to create. Select your own news, political views, shopping options, sports, entertainment and advertising access. Can weather be far behind?

The technology exists and is being made more effective. The most interesting question is what this will do to content. Tragedy? Comedy? How will personal selectivity influence and be influenced by the tastes, mores and experiences of a global population raised in disparate cultures but weaned, in the global tech era, on a diet of shared inputs? Will diversity spread or conformity rule? JL

Stuart Elliott reports in the New York Times:

TELEVISION viewers have been talking to characters in commercials for decades, even if those conversations have been one-sided and consist mostly of demands to pipe down. In an online initiative to help promote the 2014 Infiniti Q50 sport sedan, the characters talk back.

The campaign, called Infiniti Deja View, is being introduced on Tuesday by Infiniti, a division of Nissan Motor, on a section of its Web site, at infinitiusa.com/deja-view. The centerpiece of the effort is a responsive video that uses voice recognition technology to enable viewers to interact with the characters through phone calls; the plot is intended to respond dynamically to each viewer.

The video, produced by a New York agency named Campfire, complements a commercial for the Infiniti Q50 by the Infiniti creative agency of record, TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group. The commercial, titled “Factory of Life,” presents the Q50 as a symbol of nonconformity, offering it as an alternative to sport sedans from German automakers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

In the commercial, a man being groomed on a human assembly line for the usual “vehicle distribution” heeds a mysterious voice and discovers a key fob in his pocket. He escapes his fate and finds a Q50 parked alone amid the German cars, then drives off to freedom. “Luxury never felt so liberating,” an announcer declares.

To set up the Infiniti Deja View experience, which typically runs from 15 to 20 minutes, an online viewer is prompted on screen to call a toll-free number from a cellphone or personal landline and enter a five-digit code. That sets the plot into motion, revealing a pair of stylish, youngish characters — a scruffy man, played by Andrew Pastides, and a tailored woman, played by Charlotte Sullivan — driving together in a Q50 hybrid.

Although they seemingly have amnesia, viewers get a hint as to who they are when snippets of the Q50 commercial turn up. Perhaps they are lost in an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” or zoned out in an episode of “Lost.” In any event, at various points, the characters call the viewer on the previously entered phone number. When this reporter tried out the experience, he received five calls from them in about 20 minutes.

The viewer’s responses to the characters’ remarks help set their course of behavior, “Choose Your Own Adventure” style. As the woman, named Ellen, puts it in a voice-over narration, “What you say and how you say it determines the story, because only you can answer the call.”

The campaign, with a budget estimated at $2 million, is another example of an increasingly popular trend on Madison Avenue called content marketing, also known as branded content or branded entertainment. The goal is to transform prosaic product advertising, which consumers can now easily avoid or ignore, into compelling content they deem informative or entertaining.

Infiniti Deja View is not the first content marketing campaign from Infiniti, which recently worked with Motor Trend magazine, part of the Source Interlink Companies, on a video effort, “The Deal”; the clip, which ran six and a half minutes, was billed as “A Motor Trend Production.”

The goal of the Infiniti Deja View campaign is “to engage an online audience in a fairly unique and entertaining way,” said Keith St. Clair, director for marketing, communications and media at Infiniti USA in Franklin, Tenn., so that “the brand is integrated in the story, but not in such an overt, aggressive way.”

“The story line, by itself, has to be enjoyable,” Mr. St. Clair said, or the branded content will “come across as advertorial; it’s masquerading as something else, and the audience knows it.”

Infiniti USA executives expect about 400,000 people to interact with the video, Mr. St. Clair said, adding: “For every session, it costs us money, for servers and service. The more they engage, the more we’ll spend, which is a good thing.”

“We recognize that not everyone” will want to watch and play along with all three chapters of the video, Mr. St. Clair said, which is “why there are chapter breaks.”

Jeremiah Rosen, president of Campfire, said the effort makes sense for Infiniti because “technology is a pillar of the brand equity, and we want to get people’s attention through technology.”

Campfire “shot thousands of different alternatives” for the video, he added, along with “alternate takes in a recording session, audio only, in a studio.”

“You can tell Ellen she’s hot, and she’ll reply, ‘There’s no time for that now,’ ” Mr. Rosen said, laughing. “You can insult her, and she can hang up.”

To enliven the experience and make it more appealing to the target audience of “active, affluent” consumers, he added, “in social media in the next seven days we’re going to share Easter eggs, give audiences phrases at certain junctures” that will tilt the story in rewarding directions.

People can “just go through” the video, Mr. Rosen said, or “try to break it.” Based on Campfire’s work for other clients like HBO, for “Game of Thrones,” he sorts consumers into three categories of online involvement: “divers, dippers and skimmers.”

The ultimate reward for the divers, Mr. Rosen said, will be a plot twist in which Ellen, based on her conversations during the phone calls, becomes suspicious of the viewer as well as her on-screen partner “and kicks both of you out of the car.”