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mass celebration. Reznor’s audience, while substantial in Long Tail terms, had reached the point where it could most accurately be categorized as niche. But as it turns out, it was a rabidly devoted niche, willing to go to great lengths to find out more about the album, and the 42 Entertainment effort took full advantage of this fact. Also, the sensibility and overt antiauthoritarian politics of the album and the ARG campaign were a perfect ideological match for NIN’s industrial-rock fandom as well as for Reznor himself. Year Zero was to be his last release for a major label and a distribution model about which he’d become increasingly critical. And Reznor went out of his way to say that the buzz surrounding the album, which he called “the soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist,” was anything but advertising. “It’s not some kind of gimmick to get you to buy a record,” he told Rolling Stone. “It IS the art form.”

The art form, apparently, worked. Not only did Year Zero reach No. 2 on the Billboard chart after its release, it won a Grand Prix at the International Advertising Festival at Cannes.

I didn’t know a lot about Nine Inch Nails or Trent Reznor, but I had been following the “Year Zero” campaign for some time before its big win at Cannes. But what interested me most wasn’t simply the novel delivery mechanisms it employed; it was the ways in which it used long-form narrative storytelling techniques to brand or (sorry, Trent) sell a product. This was notable in an industry that had by necessity placed a premium on brevity and overt calls to action, but what transfixed me is the fact that the “Year Zero” narrative form itself, long or not, was unlike anything I’d encountered in advertising or storytelling.

I met with Susan Bonds and Alex Lieu of 42 Entertainment on the veranda at the Carlton InterContinental in Cannes the morning after their big win. Bonds is president and CEO and Lieu is chief creative officer of the small Pasadena-based marketing and entertainment (anything but advertising) firm. Between half a dozen interruptions from well-wishers ranging from tech geeks in AC/DC concert T-shirts to Hollywood studio types to agency CEOs, they described how two people who never spent a day working at an ad agency ended up at the epicenter of adland.

“We’re an entertainment company that does original content that brings people together through storytelling. The fact that we both spent time at Disney helped us a lot in that regard,” Bonds explained. “Because at Disney, the audience experience always comes first.”

Instead of the traditional copywriter/ art-director dynamic employed by most ad agencies, 42 Entertainment (which is also the company behind the campaign for the highly successful launch of the box-office-record-breaking Batman film The Dark Knight) typically relies on its alternate-reality-game background and involves everyone from sci-fi authors and sitcom writers to video game developers to create a storytelling experience that they say is exponentially more engaging and immersive than any traditional TV commercial.

Their creative process is different from the traditional advertising approach, said Lieu. “We always start by observing what people are doing new on the Web, and then we take that and think of how to build a compelling connection through stories.”

“Rather than tell a linear story in a classic arc,” explained Bonds, “we write the spine of a great story and then create the evidence as if it happened. Then the player collects that evidence and builds the story. Which is what we did with Year Zero.”

“And,” Lieu added, “unlike most agencies, we work very closely with the content creators, like Trent Reznor and [the Dark Knight director] Christopher Nolan.

“The industry is moving beyond sticking a message to content,” Lieu continued. “When the audience pieces a story together, the depth of engagement is phenomenal. We build the audience into the content. They own it.”

“We call it distributive storytelling or narrative,” Bonds explained.

So, rather than repeatedly shoving a commercial message