• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 9, 2011

Land Rover certainly knew its youthful target market's cultural history when it designed a truly novel online campaign for the upcoming Evoque compact car line. Most of these urban-dwelling late twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings surely recall the enormously popular "Choose Your Own Adventure" series of books that let kids pick endings and paths through a story line. The Being Henry interactive movie at HelloEvoque.com/beinghenry puts that format to the service of introducing the highly customizable new car. Dubbing itself "An Interactive Action-Love-Fantasy-Comedy-Adventure About Choices," the ploy ends up being effective and absorbing despite the overtly manipulative tone of the premise. And by the end of the experience you (or at least I) end up admiring the execution.

The Wire actor Leo Fitzpatrick plays the somewhat hapless Henry, and the narrator makes no bones about the fact that choice is the theme here. "Today were going to use his life to make a few choices for you," it begins. Impatient users may give up on the format in the first minutes as each branching of the decision tree has that ham-handed obviousness of a 1990s-style full-motion video game. Which way shall Henry walk down the street and into a diner or a bakery?

But just as you start wishing you were playing Dragon's Lair instead of steering a bland Millennial around town, you get into the thick of it. Turn into a bakery and suddenly you are in the middle of a robbery and get kidnapped. Go into the diner and your sisters start trying to set you up. If you are smart enough to grab Grandma and take a walk, you get to see sweet granny pull out a Dirty Harry size revolver and take shots at an alleyway rat.

The designers of Being Henry might have left the interactive film as just a branding exercise that makes the point about choices for a car that allows for through customization. But instead they take the choices you make to go through nine possible storylines and 32 possible ending and translate those decisions into car features, which the narrator walks you through after each ending. 

Veteran of commercial work for Levi's, Sony and Doritos, Nick Gordon directed the piece, and ultimately it works because the polished look and better-than-average writing invites you to run through the story again with different decisions. The paths are not modestly different but wildly different, and each one I saw had cool twist endings. 

Somewhere in here is also a special kind of bargain between audience and media maker that also came of age with this choose your own adventure generation - media collusion and transparency. Like the old multi-path tales, this one doesn't even try to convince you of any fiction, because there are multiple fictions at work. It is less about story than user control, convincing the user he has determined an ending even though he, we, they, everyone knows there is no ending. As art, multi-path adventures usually feel pretty lame. But as advertising vehicles where the point is the connection to the product, it actually can be fun.