Breaking New Ground

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Breaking New Ground

A five-hour contemporary mystery series gave OMD the opportunity to integrate a dozen brands into the action.

A man and a girl approach a gravesite, carrying the makings of a picnic. Each year, in memory of the wife and mother who died, the two carry out the same little ritual, lunching near her final resting place on the date of her death. This time, however, things don't go as usual. Happening upon what appears to be a lost briefcase, the man opens it and discovers a police file detailing a murder. Then comes the kicker: The man himself is the murder victim and the date of his demise is five days later.

Thrust into a desperate attempt to avoid his grim fate, the man, a physicist, races against the clock while trying to figure out if time travel may be at the heart of his strange predicament. The story of his struggle spins out in "5 Days to Midnight," a five-episode original drama that's attracting attention not just for its strange plotline.

While millions are expected to tune in for this original series on the Sci-Fi Channel, not everyone watching will be doing so for pure pleasure. Legions of advertising and media executives will also likely settle into their armchairs, eager to evaluate one of the first major scripted TV programs to integrate a group of advertisers, almost from the start, into its production process.

Timothy Hutton stars as a physics professor who discovers a police file describing his own murder in Sci-Fi Channel's June miniseries, "5 Days to Midnight"

It all began, in a way, with Debbie Richman. The U.S. director of national broadcast at OMD, Richman had been looking for some time for a short-run drama series that would allow her clients to be written into the action right from the beginning. "We wanted to create a seamless integration, not have the product produced and our brands dropped in at the end," she says.

Universal Television Networks, which owns Sci-Fi, USA Network and several other cable TV outlets, had been thinking along the same lines. "We'd been talking to Sci-Fi about finding some original programming that offered brand integration opportunities that we could take to a client," explains Kevin McAuliffe, senior vice president of cross-platform initiatives. When the programming department sent over the first hour of script and a treatment for "5 Days to Midnight," he and Jeff Lucas, president of advertising sales at Universal Television Networks, knew they had a project.

"It's a great story and it takes place in real time," McAuliffe says. "So viewers feel as if the story is actually unfolding as they watch."

Richman and her team liked the script and treatment so much that they committed to buy all the advertising time in the series without first nailing down which clients would participate.

"We went out on a limb, but it was really a no-brainer," she says. "It was a great story."

Once OMD had decided which brands would participate, Richman and her team began the complicated step of figuring out how to integrate each one. "You look at what the brand wants to say and what is its attitude," Richman says. "You might have a character that you want to associate with a brand because he is the image of what the brand is trying to get across. It has to be natural to the story. If characters are driving, you consider where and whether it makes sense to integrate a car."

As Richman and her team worked on all this, McAuliffe created a bible, detailing each brand, its message and personality and how it might be integrated into the show. That went to Lion's Gate Entertainment, which is producing the show, and McAuliffe got on the phone to brief the writers. Before long, writers actually began calling McAuliffe, offering suggestions about how they could write the brands into the story.

"We involved everybody upfront during the main creation process as much as we could," McAuliffe says. "That way, they were thinking contextually about these things."

Later, the bible helped the production staff, right down to set designers and grips, be aware of the process and contribute to it if need be.

By the time "5 Days to Midnight" premieres on June 7, McAuliffe will have spent 14 months working with the show's writers, producers and other crewmembers as they weave a presence for a dozen major advertisers into the show. A representative of OMD will have spent months on the set, making sure the brands are presented in exactly the right way.

"We're so excited to be able to do these kinds of things. It's a great concept for how to have a big impact in cable."

— Debbie Richman, U.S. director of national broadcast, OMD

Advertisers will play a variety of roles, ranging from an association with a character to simple placement in a scene. "The beauty was you could be a big or small spender and take advantage of the project," Richman says. Although she won't discuss the amount spent by advertisers, reports have pegged their investment at about $3 million. Richman also wouldn't discuss how brands have been integrated into the plot, as those hadn't been screened and approved by press time.

Some of the advertisers participating in "5 Days to Midnight" are integrated into the action, while others appear in product placements

Participating brands are McDonalds, Visa USA, Fedex, Sony PlayStation, William Wrigley Jr. Co., Clorox, Mountain Dew, Nivea products for men, General Electric, Universal Pictures and a major automotive manufacturer.

Both Richman and McAuliffe predict more of this kind of advertising in the future. Noting that OMD parent Omnicom has hired producer Robert Reisenberg to develop programming, Richman predicts the agency will "probably do a couple of projects a year, whether we co-fund or follow this model."

Richman believes brand integration is critical to competing in an ever more crowded entertainment environment. "We have to figure out more creative ways to create programming that resonates a brand's message," she says. "Brand integration is the buzz. The key is making it resonant and seamless and organic.

"We're so excited to be able to do these kinds of things," she continues. "It's a great concept for how to have impact in cable."

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