Shocking Barack. What just happened?
As the saying goes necessity is the mother of invention. And as is often the case, the necessity was once again a lack of sufficient funds to do the job in the traditional way. Originally the idea of riding a bike in stages across the country to the President was a plan to launch BCycle. But Brammo came up to bat first and it was adjusted to work. The first and most major adjustment was that the ride would retrace the path the auto CEOs took in their private planes to ask for bailout money. We figured a trip that cost them about 60,000 in travel would cost us less than five bucks in electricity. We came in a hair under budget. And instead of asking for something, we thought we could give the Pres something. Something fun that was a US born solution that had already made it out of the concept stage and was actually for sale at Best Buy.
So who would make the ride? We worried that it might be too weird to put the advertising guy on one of the Powercycles. And if we did how would we explain it? In the end, we decided in the world of real-time content creation it was important to have the director actually star in the production. Dave was as passionate about the product as anybody and, although he didn’t know as much as Brian, he is a natural communicator. We would need that, especially with the newness of the event. He and Brian would make the perfect pair. And the easiest way to describe who Dave was turned out to be to just be completely transparent. He’s the ad guy.
It would be a buddy story. A buddy story of the inventor and the ad guy.
The stage would be the blue highways and the American towns between Detroit and DC; the players would be the engineer and the ad guy and the people they met along the way. To capture the whole thing would mean a chase-vehicle filled with Steve, the camera man, Madison, the producer, Mike, the editor and Dave’s partner, Burnie. They would Motel and couch surf their way across the countryside tweeting and shooting and editing non-stop for two weeks. It would be done on half a shoestring and in the end, we would have…?
That’s the thing about this that’s so fundamentally different than anything that has even a tiny media buy connected. With media you know you’ll get something but here, there is a very real chance that absolutely nothing happens. Yet we were also confident that what we were doing mattered and that, maybe when something matters, it has a chance to get noticed. But to be honest, there wasn’t a lot of time to think about that because it was a mad dash to get it done before the weather turned to shit. I’ve ridden in bad weather and I really didn’t want to subject these guys or the bikes to that. It turned out that we were able to get our ducks in a row and our boys on the road just at the exact time the weather went to total shit. Cold and rain were the constant. How cold and how much rain were the variables for 90 percent of the trip.
The effort started humbly and quietly but steadily picked up momentum and followers. Balloon Boy didn’t help but that blew over and soon, we could see a steady increase in interest. People began working in front of the scenes and behind the scenes to help. From places to stay to places to charge to political connections. The campaign was being fueled not by money, but by personal passions and a genuine interest to help. Social media launched the event into the traditional media who picked up the story in innumerable towns along the way and in places like The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. At the beginning of this bizarre odyssey, I would have said they had a one in ten thousand chance of getting an audience with the President. By the end, it was feeling somewhere between one in ten and fifty/fifty. To get Craig a meeting in the Whitehouse with Secretary Chu and other energy leaders is an incredible feeling. And maybe the most fitting ending. We did make one last ditch effort and I hear the bike is gone. So maybe we will still see Obama rocking and rolling on electric power on his next visit to the Capital building.
Looking back on Shocking Barack, it’s difficult to not feel like something happened. And we find ourselves standing around asking each other the same question that you ask when you witness something out of the ordinary; “What just happened?” And we get the feeling we just had a glimpse into some of what our lives might be like in the next five years. A glimpse at a new kind of real-time interactive campaign where you are forced to participate if you expect others to participate. A glimpse at a new set of skills that will be required of creative people and production people. A glimpse at a new kind of relationship between brand, product, and marketer. A glimpse at how the term “ad guy” becomes less like “used car salesman” and more like “buddy.”
Thanks Dave. We may owe you one.
Shockingbarack.com
