Thursday, June 02, 2005
Suite and Innocent Wins
Come on, admit it. When you’re alone on a business trip, in a faceless hotel, and you’re switching channels aimlessly, and the big fat TV remote with all the pay-per-view buttons calls out to you, you first browse through the “still in theatres” section, and then looking quietly over your virtual shoulder, your finger just sorta slips and you find yourself staring at the menu screen for adult entertainment on demand. You click through a few pages of names that all sound alike, and finding nothing interesting, decide to call your wife, and go to sleep, because you have a long day ahead tomorrow.
Yeah, right.
CP+B in Miami counted on exactly those nimble fingers when they created Suite and Innocent, a ten minute raunchy spoof on adult movies that promotes Virgin Atlantic‘s Upper Class Suite service on flights between London and New York. Made exclusively for the pay-per-view systems in hotels, it masqueraded as a “free movie” in the list of purchasable movies in the adult sections of LodgeNet and On Demand.
The piece itself is a cheeky tongue-in-cheek parody of soft and hard core films, with characters named Miles High, Big Ben and Summer Turbulence. There’s no nudity or profanity, but there’s enough innuendo to have made Rodney Dangerfield blush.
What’s also interesting about the piece is that it captures the highly elusive business traveler at a time when they’re in a context to hear an advertising message. Seth Godin took exception to this, and pointed out to me that “they were in a context to see some porn,” so I should explain.
I was helping the Raffles group of hotels a couple of years ago with thinking about customer retention and expansion in the US, and ended up doing focus groups and a bunch of long form interviews with some senior road-warrior execs. Three interesting points that came from that research:
1. Male execs that are extremely busy during the workday let their “messaging defenses” down a couple of times a day: in the john, in the morning, and after a long day at work, back in the hotel at night.
2. Watching porn at night is almost an automatic response to the long day, and their lifestyle. 6 out of 15 could remember, word for word, the opening credits of “TEN - The Erotic Network.”
3. 8 out of 15 stopped and watched an infomercial when browsing late night TV, and 5 used the word “fascinating.”
Anyway, it marks another notch in the industry’s slow but sure movement away from the domination of broadcast media to get brand messages across to customers.
Last week, CP+B picked up a Clio for the piece in the Contact and Content category, which is well deserved; as a targetted customer acquisiton vehicle, its a big risk that paid off handsomely both for client and agency.