An Ill-Fated, Dragon-Headed, Slow Boat to China

If you happened to be walking by Pier 66 on a certain August evening last year, you might have noticed an odd vessel plying the waters of Elliott Bay. Nudged along by a Foss tugboat was a flat barge carrying a half-dozen cargo containers. The containers were no different from ones that go in and out of the Port of Seattle every day, except that instead of bearing some bland shipping-company logo, such as Hanjin or Cosco, they were dolled up like colorful billboards. A pair of them were wrapped in an ad for Cadillac, and there was even an Escalade parked on top.

The event was the gala waterfront launch of a local startup business called China8. With backing from a prominent UW professor, several specialists in maritime communications and homeland security, a small army of publicists from APCO Worldwide, and former Washington Governor Gary Locke, China8 unveiled what it somewhat comically called a "never-before seen 4-dimensional advertising medium."

China8 proposed that instead of piling blank rectangles atop one another on trains and cargo ships, those metal canvases should be put to work for corporate America. And it planned to start with the biggest worldwide advertising opportunity around: the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

"Big, hairy audacious goal!" So "roared" China8 executive John Anderson, as USA Today reported in an enthusiastic storyabout the event.

The company planned to send a couple thousand advertising-emblazoned containers off on a cargo ship topped with a dragon head for a months-long, attention-getting voyage from Tacoma to Beijing. Once in China, the containers would be installed at roadsides near the Olympic Village and other strategic sites. They might be stacked to form the world's biggest iPod, or arranged into a skate park. China8 sponsors would gain "access to some of the last available advertising space for the 2008 Olympic Games," the company said in a press release.

China8 even offered a humanitarian twist, promising to fill some of the cargo boxes with medical and educational supplies for rural China. Schoolchildren would be enlisted to decorate containers in a bid for global understanding. A portion of company profits would be donated to a charity supporting the construction of Chinese hospitals.

"Talk about thinking outside the box," Anderson told USA Today. "We are denying the box exists!"

A year later, it is China8 that does not exist. The company and its containers never made it to the Olympics. Indeed, the effort fell apart within weeks. People who worked for the venture are now fighting in court to be paid. Former Governor Locke, who traveled to China on behalf of the company and called it "a great way to foster cultural exchange while showcasing incredible technology," now downplays his previous involvement. And the mastermind behind the business, a onetime creator of fish-skin swimsuits named Paul Willms, who was bankrupt less than 10 years ago—and who at the time of the China8 launch was subject to cease-and-desist orders by business regulators in two other states—is moving on to his next venture.

Advertising was really only a tail-wag for China8. The project's larger objective was to market a new anti-terrorism technology from a Willms company called Erudite, Inc.

With thousands of cargo containers arriving in the U.S. every day—largely unchecked—U.S. ports are widely recognized as one of our most vulnerable entry points. Erudite had developed a novel type of acoustical sensor that, when installed in a container, can detect whether it has been opened or its contents tampered with en route. The company had also created a GPS lock that can both track a container's whereabouts and prevent it from being opened until it reaches its intended destination.

But how to get the shipping industry, or government regulators, to embrace the product? Shippers are frugal, observes Ty Graham, a vice president at Seattle-based SeaMobile, who's on the Erudite board of directors. Most cargo haulers, unless they're dealing in high-value goods, aren't going to want to spend a lot of money to keep tabs on boxes of bananas.

That's where advertising comes in handy. "It's a way to underwrite the cost of the devices," says Les Atlas, a UW electrical engineering professor who led the development of Erudite's system. Selling the surface of the container as advertising creates revenue that can be used to pay for the security tracking, just as the ads near this article covers the cost of producing this newspaper.

In the case of shipping, the one technology supports the other. The ability to track the container is also essential to being able to sell advertising on it, as China8 project director Amanda Bakke explained in an interview last August. No one's going to pay to wrap their name around a container if it's only going to be buried under a hundred other boxes on a freighter in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But if you can tell the advertiser what time, and for how long, a container will be traveling by train through a high-visibility urban area—and verify it—then the sale becomes more viable.

Thus was born China8, a joint venture between two Willms companies: Erudite and GBoards, which is in the outdoor-media business. The Olympics "presented an ideal stage for us," said Willms last week in an e-mail. "The China8 Project would draw attention to the concept of cargo containers, alerting the public to the importance of detecting threats that may lie within and challenging advertisers to imagine the possibilities of a new medium to reach a global audience."