In 1998, a dozen beautiful men and women began popping up on television, billboards, websites and magazines in Europe and the United States. They were your typical, late-90s beautiful people: Forlorn and apparently bored with their gorgeousness, they stared out at the world with a gaze that suggested thoughts that were either profound, or profoundly vacuous.
It was not odd that these people looked somewhat mysterious -- they were Calvin Klein fragrance models, models being a species that always appears to be a bit hard to figure out. What was odd, however, was that the ads -- for Calvin Klein's signature fragrance, the "unisex" cKone -- provided a then-novel way to peer into the enigma: an e-mail address.
This 1998 Calvin Klein e-mail ad campaign is described by some in the ad world as being, if not revolutionary, then at least precedent-setting. The print and television ads lasted for only a little while, but the e-mail campaign that accompanied it lasted more than three years, winding down just last December, after attracting hundreds of thousands of followers.
The reason for its unceremonious and unannounced end, its creators say, was that after three years, it just got old.
The idea behind the campaign was this: A teenage guy or girl (that was the target demographic), smitten by the model, would send a quick note to tia@ckone.com, anna@ckone.com, robert@ckone.com and/or any of the others, asking for info. In return, the teenager would get back a note that read like a letter to an old friend -- it was personal, friendly and it treated the reader as a confidant.
For example, here's an excerpt from one of Anna's early letters: "survived but barely," she starts (note the lowercase). "i would have written sooner but i was scared my mom would walk in on my typing and catch me red-handed. shes gone off to the drugstore so i have about a half-hour window. you would not believe how screwed up an idea it was to have a party!!!!!!!"
The letter goes on to describe how much Anna loves a certain unnamed "he," and she adds that if "you want nothing more to do with me, simply title your reply 'get lost' and I won't bother you anymore. Don't worry, I'm used to rejection."
Every few days, another letter would come from Anna and the others, confiding more details from the characters' lives -- whom they loved, whom they hoped to love, how their dream somehow always fell short of coming true.
The creators of the campaign at Wieden + Kennedy, Calvin Klein's advertising agency, didn't call it a "soap opera," but the series did have the feel of a soap. Characters invited the reader into a world of their own, with the aim, say the creators, of emotionally connecting with the readers.
"In my head, I took the universal themes of love, lust, etc., and combined it with the most modern thing actually 'connecting us,' the Internet. E-mail specifically," wrote Kevin Drew Davis, the creative director at Wieden who worked on the campaign.
"Ten characters, each writing to you as if you're their personal friend about what they were going through. But on a macro scale, each one of the characters was somehow connected to the others. E.g., Robert was Anna's father, Robert was trying to have an affair with Tia, Anna lusted after Danny, etc."
In a telephone interview, Davis said "it was supposed to be a discovery for the people who wrote in, and those first e-mails were great. They were asking a lot of questions about what this was."
More than that, though, the campaign worked. "Hundreds of thousands of people went through the cKone e-mail," Davis wrote. Fragrance sales increased, and, "because of the nature of the campaign and the time it was launched, it got a LOT of PR. Some people loved it, some people hated it. But isn't that every Calvin Klein campaign?"
Eventually, Calvin Klein stopped the print and TV spots, but they wanted the e-mails "to just keep going and going," according to Colin Dodd, a 34-year-old fiction writer and bartender in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who was contracted by the company to write the messages.
Dodd had written a few short stories and had spent a long while turning one of his stories into a movie that wasn't getting made, "So I really needed the money," he said. "I was skeptical when I did it, and I thought it was going to take away all of my sensibilities. I was like, advertising -- nothing but evil. But it was fun, and in the end it made me a better writer."
And it's not hard to see how that happened. Over the three years, here's the story that developed, as described by Dodd (after he warned, "this is going to be a run-on"):
"The initial story revolved around a commercial production company," Dodd started. "Robert was the director at the prod company, married to Patty, and they had a 15-year-old daughter named Anna, who had a crush on Danny, who was 18, who became a baseball player.
"Now, Tia worked for Robert as a producer, and he fell in love with her and left his wife. Ian was production assistant and he fell in love with Tia, too, and he eventually won Tia away -- or Tia eventually fell for Ian, although Ian had help from Kristy, who was his best friend, until they realized that they were in love."
Also in the mix was Erica, a "femme fatale" who found herself in intimate situations with the other males.
Dodd said Calvin Klein laid down some ground rules for the characters -- "no drinking, no drugs, no sex among the teenagers in the story" -- but for three years, he had a fair amount of creative freedom. The one thing that the campaign never did was plug the fragrance.
"If you're talking about big brands like that, it's more important that you get the idea across, get an image across more than mention the scent," Dodd said. "So there were no passages like, 'Gosh, Tia smells so good.'"
There have been several interactive ad campaigns since the Calvin Klein project, and many of those have kept the product veiled. A campaign for Steven Spielberg's A.I. last year, for instance, led people on an Internet scavenger hunt to find fictitious characters from the movie's setting. It didn't have anything to do with the movie, really, but it did create buzz. That was the same principle that helped make The Blair Witch Project so popular.
Calvin Klein urged Dodd to keep the situations relatively open-ended, "on the premise that if there was uncertainty, people would keep coming back." In an e-mail, Dodd added that people kept reading the messages because the characters kept revealing their secrets.
"E-mail can have a confessional tone, and I tried to have one secret revealed per e-mail. Anna hating her father, Ian loving his boss, Tia losing interest in Ian, Kristy hating New York ... the things they couldn't tell anyone else," he wrote.
Indeed, by her final message, Anna seems genuinely touched by her conversations with the reader. "It's so weird and funny how sometimes it feels like something doesn't really happen to me until I get home and write it to you in an e-mail and tell you about it," she writes (Note how, three years later, her writing style has changed).
And readers, too, were touched, Davis wrote. "The thing that impressed me most is that teenagers completely got it right away," Davis wrote. "For example, there was a group of school girls in the U.K. (several signups from the same school) who took on Anna as a personal friend. They would write things like, 'We know you're just a machine, but you need to watch out for Danny....'
"They were letting the character in on what the other character had been saying to them. They were trying to direct the story! It was fantastic beyond my wildest expectations."
