Digital Viral Marketing Academy

In 'Ambush' (Dir John Frankenheimer), Clive Owen plays a driver who gets a passenger with some rather dangerous extra baggage. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker, it’s a classic in short movies with a powerful story, a compelling thread and in spite of the length, strong character development. The hero? The BMW of course.

Along the way the brand plays a central role as key performer; stylish, slick, non-nonsense, high performance and rock solid. In fact, the very fact the car not only survives a fight with a bigger bully, but walks away with only some bad scratches, gives the body the parallel of the action hero’s face where the make-up artist places that token scratch after he’s taken on an army single handedly. From a brand marketing perspective, this showcases the product (in detail), builds the brand (around key attributes such as safety, speed, exceptional control, design, thrills), weaves in celebrity endorsement (and probably brand aspiration), and gets under the radar of advertising standards’ regulators (because it’s there is no paid for media involved, at the time it was very much beyond the advertising code of practice). Having a viral mechanic successfully achieve distribution gives even more weight to the marketing through the way the pass-on effect achieves cut-through. Masterful, and deservedly multi award-winning.