__twocolumncontent.jpg)
The Long Road Home may be a series about war, but in many of the promos no bullets sound.
Instead, National Geographic uses calm, quiet moments to tease the true story of Black Sunday—the day a platoon of soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas, were ambushed in 2004 on the fourth day of a peacekeeping mission in Iraq. Spots show empty shell cases strewn across the ground, a wife holding her husband’s shirt close as she pulls it from the dryer, the ominous ringing of the phone, a son asking why his father must go off to battle.
“There’s something very powerful in promoting a show about war and doing it almost silently,” said Chris Spencer, EVP, creative and marketing, National Geographic Partners.
He joined the network in July after 25 years at HBO overseeing campaigns for such groundbreaking shows as Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. Spencer had a “fantastic master class at the HBO school of premium marketing promotion” and says he was “very lucky with my timing to be there when their world exploded.”
“It was time to go, and off I went,” he said of his exit. “I spent a couple of years freelancing.”
He and his wife co-directed the feature film Valley Inn, and he became involved with Nat Geo as a consultant for limited series Genius about Albert Einstein. Once there, he recognized a marketing team full of “people punching way above their weight” and wanted to be involved with that.
His campaign for The Long Road Home is part of a larger effort to take National Geographic’s marketing to the next level.
“I want everything that comes out of this shop to feel like premium, paid cable content,” Spencer said. “I want people to be very surprised because as much as they love Nat Geo—and it’s a beloved brand—I really want people to look at it and go, wow, they are playing in a bigger space now.”
In addition to The Long Road Home, and a second season of Genius, Nat Geo has been steadily adding scripted series to its roster, including a second season of scripted/documentary hybrid Mars, as well as upcoming feature documentary Jane and documentary series Chain of Command that looks at the war against violent extremism through access granted by the U.S. Armed Forces.
There’s been a growing synchronicity among the network’s marketing creative, marketing strategy, public relations, digital and social divisions that’s evoking a sense of ‘hey, here we come,’ Spencer said.
“It feels like what HBO felt like before Sex and the City and The Sopranos,” he said.
RELATED: Chris Spencer Named EVP, Creative, at National Geographic Partners
From the sound design to the social cutdowns and printed posters, he would put the marketing for The Long Road Home on par with what Emmy darlings such as FX and HBO are doing.
The show itself also demonstrates what he calls “the branding north star of ‘further.’”
“War is war, and everyone kind of knows what they’re going to get,” Spencer said. “The ‘further’ is not just war. It’s war and family. It’s not just guns and things blowing up. It’s about what happens to these guys as a unit when thrown into peril, and how that ripples out.”
The impact of wives and kids at home is a critical component of the series, and Spencer builds tension by juxtaposing “crazy, front-ring action sequences followed by the nerve-wracking hell people go through when their loved ones are in danger.”
The loud and soft moments, happening simultaneously in different places, establish an intense pace throughout the promos.
“I want to slam you into the next environment, and bang you around,” he said. “You have all hell breaking loose, and you cut to somebody pulling clothes out of the dryer. Both of those are terrible situations.”
They’re also situations rooted in truth.
The Long Road Home is based on the book of the same name by ABC’s Martha Raddatz, who served as a consultant for the show along with many of the soldiers, wives and widows.
Series stars include Kate Bosworth, John Kelly and Jeremy Sisto, all of whom had deep conversations with many of the people involved in the events that unfolded that day while living in duplexes at Fort Hood during filming.
RELATED: Nat Geo Paints Accurate Pictures of War, Extremism, Politics
“There’s a balancing act,” Spencer said. “This is television entertainment. It’s a series produced for a mass audience. At the same time, you have to be aware you’re telling a true story that changed the lives of many of the participants.”
For instance, a pivotal part of the story focuses on a young serviceman who is paralyzed, who carries a book with the Alan Seeger poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” in his bag. Spencer had all the key actors read it, and cut powerful spots using that as the script.
As much as The Long Road Home seeks to capture the emotional elements of Black Sunday, “at a certain point in the promotional campaign, you have to deliver the baby,” he said. “You can’t dance around anymore. You have to show what you have.”
After all, “we’re trying to promote a big TV show here,” and sometimes “I just feel like you should see the flat-out combat.”
From both a marketing perspective, and looking at the series as a whole, he believesThe Long Road Home checks all the boxes for success.
“At the end of the day, it has to be entertaining or people are not going to watch it. And it’s very entertaining,” he said. “I think it’s a fantastic combination of both an entertaining drama and an incredibly powerful message about sacrifice and war.”
The Long Road Home debuts with a two-episode premiere November 7 at 9 p.m.
Tags: