• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 8, 2011

Trendy beer merchant Stella Artois has brewed a fun and highly elaborate promotion that leverages Mad Men chic, user-gen content, and an alternative reality premise. Whether it will prove a branding success is anyone's guess, but you have to hand it to the creative team for building a relentless online fantasy in which the user can play. The Le Cannes Casting Call extends the brand's upcoming sponsorship of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival by having users submit auditions to play the lead in a bio-pic about the purported "King  of Cannes," Jacques d-Azur.

In this alternate reality, d'Azur was a past winner of Cannes in the 60s whose life story seems impossible to cast. The back story for d'Azur is laid on thick with grainy, low-res retro film stock of the star at Cannes and press conferences with the filmmaker who tried long ago to put this life to film. If looking like a cross between Sean Connery at the height of his Bond fame and Don Draper sliding through cool 60s sets, d'Azur owes more than a little to Dos Equis and "The Most Interesting Man in the World" motif. The idea of a fantasy, mildly roguish man about town may seem trite, but it is a welcome counterpoint to the modern boy-oaf model perpetrated relentlessly by the new rude cinema.

But kudos to Stella Artois for following through with the motif. Entrants at the audition site don't simply upload tapes. They are led through a video audition experience where their Web cam images and readings are inserted into the screen test scene. The process itself is fun conveys a whimsy to the brand.

Audition winners (for male and female leads) will win a real starring role in a Jacques d'Azur short film that Stella Artois will premiere at Cannes. Winners also get a trip to the film festival as well. The brands is also using the short film as a way to reward its invitation-only "La Societe" members club.
The hallmark of a good spoof is its seamlessness and comprehensive quality. Stella Artois crafts the fiction at multiple touch points, from the casting site, to the member's only club and also to a series of video clips at its Media Center.

It is hard to say if elaborate ongoing fictions around brands like Stella Artois or Dos Equis represent a new creative convention or a kind of exhaustion in advertising. Classic advertising of the 60s was pure aspiration - these were the people Americans hoped to be. But then the aspiration was sub-conscious and so perhaps more effective. In this post-modern configuration we watch and admire the creation of the fiction itself and then are invited to join in the fun. What exactly are we "aspiring to" now? Being cool, or just knowingly play-acting coolness?

The old adage of the Beats was "Be cool, but care." We have replaced it with "Act cool, and know you are acting."