Battleship

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I think technology gets in the way of ideas that can change the fortunes of a brand.

In the film ‘Battleship’, based on the board game, Taylor Kitsch, playing US Navy officer Alex Hopper, borrows a WWII battleship to save the world.

Here’s the set-up scene:

[Aboard the USS Missouri]

CPO Walter Lynch: This ship is 70 years old. It's totally outdated. The firing control systems are all analog. The engines haven't been started in a decade, which would be fine, but they're steam, which I have no idea how to fire up. And even if I had the owner's manual and six weeks to go through it all, we still don't have enough crew to fire it up. [Turns to LT Hopper] I don't know what you're thinking, sir.

[The camera pans back to show more than ten 'old salts', former crewmen of the USS Missouri from various wars, standing watch over the ship. They approach the survivors from the USS John Paul Jones.]

Old Salt: [Shaking hands with LT Hopper] Is everyone all right?

LT Alex Hopper: Yes, sir, we're okay...You men have already given so much to your country, and no one has a right to ask any more, but I'm asking.

Old Salt: What do you need, son?

LT Alex Hopper: I need to borrow your boat. 

Hopper then single-handedly manoeuvres the Missouri around the coast of Hawaii so that the sun rises behind him, momentarily blinding the warring light-sensitive aliens in their space ship. His clever ploy – a speedy reaction to a hunch - buys him precious moments to fire his few remaining shells at their advanced craft, destroying it, bringing down their force field, tractor beam and drones, closing the interplanetary vortex, saving the world and gaining future father-in-law Liam Neeson’s approval. Not a bad effort.

Any thoughts that these aliens could have figured this out with their space-age calculators are temporarily blown to smithereens.

In movie speak, this is called an ‘it might just work’ moment, when all logic is set aside and instinct takes over.

These days the lives of business leaders, marketeers and communications professionals are often ruled by maths, pushing instinct into the background.  Marketing and communications have become numbers games, often slaves to an algorithm.  The question is: should they be? Or rather, should they be totally dominated by maths?

When I look at stories and memes that travel best on social networks, what I see is non-mathematical, counter-intuitive and humorous insights succeeding – the ‘it might just work’ stories, in other words. 

These present a very human face to a brand.  When, for instance, we announced that protection against Dalek invasion was covered by Virgin Media’s life insurance policy (not to mention invasion by the aliens from Battleship), these stories travelled far and wide on social media in ways that sponsored tweets could never do.

Is there a place in modern marketing for the ‘it might just work’ ideas that only PR can deliver?  Not surprisingly, I think the answer is ‘yes’.  I hope you do too. Permission to come aboard?