China8 project boxes up grand ad plan

SEATTLE -- Standing on a barge stacked with 40-foot shipping containers dressed up like advertising billboards, John Anderson shouted joyfully to a crowd of advertising executives and trade officials arriving at Seattle's waterfront to hear a decidedly unconventional business plan.

"Big hairy audacious goal!" roared Anderson, CEO of Everett, Wash.-based Erudite, which is developing an advanced system for making shipping containers tamperproof.

These are not words one would expect to hear from the chief of an obscure start-up working on cutting-edge technologies for securing and tracking shipping containers in real time.

What Erudite has set out to accomplish is more out of Alice in Wonderland than any marketing textbook. It has no revenue, and its defining product is still being tested. Yet, it is attempting to pull off a global publicity stunt with a dizzying array of humanitarian and commercial goals on a tight deadline.

"Talk about thinking outside the box," says Anderson, gleefully. "We are denying the box exists!"

How Erudite's outrageous strategy evolved takes some explaining. In 2003, company founder Paul Willms, a serial entrepreneur and successful real estate broker, figured he'd get ahead of demand for a highly secure container-tracking system sure to be driven by rising concerns about terrorist attacks targeting U.S. port cities.

Willms recruited University of Washington electrical engineering professor Les Atlas to develop a system that uses a GPS-activated lock to keep a container shut tight until it reaches its destination. Atlas' invention also uses an acoustical sensor, which continually emits sound waves inside the container. If the door ever cracks open when it shouldn't, the acoustical signature changes, tripping an alert.

Last December, Willms needed to raise $13 million to test the system on a trans-Pacific shipment of several hundred leased containers. Then a light bulb went off. Willms thought: Why not sell advertising on the sides of the containers, tied to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, to pay for the testing?

Enter former Washington governor Gary Locke, a Chinese-American, now a trade attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine, Erudite's law firm. Locke suggested building an ad campaign around a youth cultural exchange and a humanitarian initiative. "Gary put everything in the right order so that it was possible to achieve," says Mary Tan, Locke's chief of staff.

In late July, Locke, who is treated like a rock star in China, led an Erudite trade mission to Beijing. Doors opened. The Olympic Committee agreed to let Erudite use the official Olympic logo for an ad campaign, called China8, to be affixed to Erudite's test containers.

Anderson and Willms returned home on July 24 with promises that red tape would melt away and allow them to place 2,008 containers emblazoned with corporate ads and 300 containers carrying messages from schools, trade groups and humanitarian agencies in locations around Beijing. Since then, logistics planning has been in hyperdrive. Willms envisions:

•Emblazoning 60 containers with student art and 60 more with messages from trade commissions. These, he says, will come from the 50 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces. He also wants to plaster messages from humanitarian groups on 120 containers and fill many of them with donated supplies earmarked for rural areas.

•Selling $200 million worth of corporate ads on 2,008 containers. Base price: $30,000 per container. Premium-priced containers will sell for $100,000. Some will be stacked eight high in spiraling towers in prime locations; dozens are earmarked to form a gigantic stage in the round.

•Turning several containers into souvenir stores hawking cowboy hats, polo shirts, flip-flop sandals, memory sticks and other items bearing the China8 logo. Projected revenue: $100 million.

Less than two weeks after returning from China, China8 project director Amanda Bakke put on a public unveiling on Seattle's waterfront. An identical event is planned Nov. 1 in New York City. As summer winds down, Bakke has no shortage of creative plans — but no U.S. organization or advertiser has yet signed up. "There is no template to work with here," Bakke says. "We're simply on a fast track."

Shimon Liang, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based trade consultant, caught wind of China8 and signed on as president of China operations. Liang says the bureaucracy and corruption that bedevils Western corporations trying to do business in China won't be a factor, given China8's top-tier approval.

"Nobody (in China) is going to want to be a stumbling block for this," Liang says. He says port authorities have vowed to spit-and-polish the customs yard that will receive Erudite's containers.

But will non-profits and corporate advertisers in the West jump on board? Dave Remer, CEO of Seattle-based ad agency Remerinc, thinks they might. "This is unique, and it demands attention," Remer says. "For a segment of global advertisers, this will fit like a glove."

And what about the security technology underlying all of this? Willms says container advertising could catch on after the Olympics. He envisions a new advertising medium — globe-spanning billboards — serving to offset the cost of installing and maintaining Erudite's acoustical sensors and GPS locks.

"By tying our GPS device in with these containers, we'll be able to tell advertisers exactly where their billboard was and for how long," Willms says. "It will drive advertising demand and rates."