Buss One Seven: Broadband Buzz from BMW
Bmwfilms.com generates sparks, but will it run out of gas?
by Roderick Armageddon

As I’m waiting for my favorite city bus to whisk me back to my cabana, a flashy BMW Z3 hardtop rolls by. It’s a sharp ride, no doubt about it. Somehow just the sight of this pricey little two seater manages to induce a whole slew of thoughts, forcing me to believe that if it weren’t for my lack of cash and desire to commute via public transit, I’d be in one as soon as humanly possible. The Z3’s lines are extremely smooth, reminiscent of the hand formed flanks of early Bugattis, with just a hint of a WWII Spitfire fighter plane thrown in for good measure. All of this style packaged with the smart appeal of a precise, mass-produced, technologically superior piece of German engineering.

That’s guerilla marketing at work in its most pure form: watching someone else using a product or service and looking or feeling good while doing it — it sends a signal straight to the soul, letting me know that I am missing out on a whole world of undiscovered joy and pleasure, all because I don’t own or participate in this obviously thrilling activity. Aside from face-to-face marketing like this, how else can a company let me know that I could be substantially more randy with their product or service? Plug in your cable modem, Jimmy, it’s time for broadband to open up the marketing floodgates.

BMW decided some time ago that in order to advance their branding while building a new level of chic, they would hire a handful of big-time directors such as Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Guy Ritchie (Snatch) and John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) to make short digital films featuring BMWs. The films would blend the art of filmmaking with the science of marketing, helping to create such a powerful brand building and image crafting exercise that no other company could compete. BMWfilms.com was born. The result is that BMWfilms.com has become one of the most-talked about ad campaigns in recent memory.

The offspring of this concept are viewable only on the Web at www.bmwfilms.com. To promote the shorts, BMW has expended a good deal of cash (some estimate upwards of $10 million) on television advertising to pull people to the Website and then "push" their message and subsequent products — tough job… pushing and pulling your potential customers. In order to view the films, you can stream them if you have a fast connection, or you can choose to download the BMW Player, which allows you to play the "enhanced" films while checking the availability of new films and trailers each time you connect to the Internet. The enhanced films feature additional content and DVD-like control and features — plus, you actually download the film to your PC, so you can have it with you at all times without having to connect to the Internet. This is especially valuable for those folks who might want a little extra entertainment on a short hopper flight. As groovy as it may sound, don’t let the enhanced option fool you… just like the streaming versions of the film, unless you have a fast connection, you’ll spend an entire night (or more) downloading one film. Worse yet, this technological blockade might just force you to settle for viewing the "small" version of the 30-second trailer (both the films and trailers are available in small and large file sizes).

All marketing chat aside, there is an inherent flaw in the customer side of BMWfilms.com: speed. Interesting isn’t it? The films are all about speed — and cutting edge recklessness — yet they are highly inaccessible for the majority of America’s Web surfers due to the sluggishness of the consumer network. True, many people surf fat sites from work, but what about those who don’t? There are plenty of occupations out there that don’t require a person to sit in front of a high-speed connection all day, so the home PC becomes the only method of connecting to the Web.

While Enterprise LANs, WANs and MANs are gaining connectivity speeds up to 10Gb/s (ultra high speed optical Ethernet), the home networks are still slaves to dial-up and DSL — while some have the option of cable (which slows down considerably as you add users from the same neighborhood). What is broadband? Anything faster than 250K/s downloads? I think not. 250K or 100Mbps may be faster than 56K, but it’s still not as fast as AT&T would like us to think (have you seen their ads?) How about 2.5Gb/s downloads? Perhaps. Among the big players in the network equipment world (Cisco, Juniper, Sycamore, etc.), most are touting that broadband is now nothing more than a marketing term that has been pillaged by consumer-focused network service providers — a word that once stood for high speed connectivity and fat pipes (no less than 2.5Gb/s), but now just stands for anything faster than a 56K dialup. The industry’s biggest players are less concerned about home connectivity than the Enterprise due to the lack of home network infrastructure and consumer’s unwillingness to pay upwards of $150/month for high-speed communications in their home. Until network equipment prices drop and network service providers decide to lay the infrastructure, we’re stuck with dialup, DSL and the occasional cable link… this isn’t broadband, this is "faster than it was."

Not to be deterred by 56K speed bumps, BMW has decided to address connectivity problems by distributing CDs with all five movies bundled with the September issue of Vanity Fair. When technology prevents you from stepping forward, don’t overlook the option of stepping back… the buzz has already reached terminal velocity, now it’s time to deliver the product in an easy-to-access format.

Until "faster than it was" connectivity becomes "WHOA," marketing efforts like BMWfilms.com are nothing more than public relations tools guaranteed to further the careers of advertising and PR execs (not that that’s a bad thing), while enticing film buffs with Flashy sites, trendy Directors and groovy technology. The again, maybe BMW intended that all along, and if a few people were actually able to get online and view the films, all the better. According to Advertising Age, the films have been downloaded more than six million times since April, and Automotive News says that BMW sales are up 32% from June 2000 to 2001. Maybe BMW isn’t ahead of their time with the concept, they’re just looking at the project through a different lens, with an entirely different set of goals. If that’s the case, Touché… BMW latest release has scored five stars on the buzz meter.