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My Product!
Viral
marketing using alternate-reality games brings advertising
into the 21st century
By
David King
You can hear it ringing in the distance, a pay phone somewhere
down the block from you, chiming out in the dark. You were
told to answer it at 8 PM, and here you are at 8:01, splashing
through puddles, trudging through rain-drenched streets, trying
to get to what you assume must be the last remaining pay phone
in your city. And then, you are there with the dirty receiver
pressed up against your ear; you listen intently, a notepad
by your side, capturing every detail, looking for any clue.
Then you think to yourself, “I did all this for an advertisement?”
This isn’t just advertising; this is viral marketing, what
some would call the future of advertising. While viral marketing
has been in the news lately—because of a late-January Aqua
Teen Hunger Force campaign that brought Boston to a halt
with Lite Brite-like signs that were mistaken for bombs—the
future of viral marketing will be based less on stunts, and
more on interactivity and immersion.
In 2004, this is how 42 Entertainment got hundreds of thousands
of fans of the “Halo” video game to flock to its advertising
campaign for “Halo 2.” Rather than cramming their campaign
down consumers’ throats, 42 Entertainment started a Web site
called ilovebees.com, which had the appearance of a bee enthusiasts’
site having been taken over by a stranded, alien, artificial
intelligence. From there, the advertiser drew fans through
an alternate-reality game that required players to rush to
pay phones around the world every week for the latest installment
of radio plays, each of which would reveal one more clue about
the story, one more Internet site, one more puzzle to solve.
When the game was finished, some players had unlocked the
opportunity to play the game early, and “Halo 2” was an astounding
success, with sales of $125 million in its first day of release
alone.
According to Elan Lee, vice president of 42 Entertainment,
the idea for this approach to advertising came about during
a conversation he had while working at Microsoft with 42 Entertainment’s
future president, Jordan Weisman. “We were talking about the
future of gaming, and Jordan’s phone rang; and before he answered
it he made the offhanded comment, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool if
that was a game calling me right now?’ We started talking
about how you make it so that a game, rather than using a
computer console . . . used your life as a game board.”
While both Weisman and Lee come from video-game backgrounds
at Microsoft, they have demonstrated that their approach to
viral marketing, which employs complex, alternate-reality
games (ARG), is effective in capturing audiences for all sorts
of products, including film and music. Their first project
was an ARG to promote Steven Spielberg’s film A.I.
Fans could decode Web sites and phone numbers in the movie
poster to enter a murder mystery based on the themes of the
movie.
“For
almost all the products we create, we immerse the user in
a narrative,” says Lee. “We make them feel like their own
life intersects with the world of whatever product they are
experiencing. Our bread and butter is narrative.”
The current narrative 42 Entertainment probably is responsible
for (Lee won’t comment on an active campaign) involves the
distant future, when the government will poison the water
with a mind-controlling substance called Parepin; a handlike
figure will appear from the sky, sending fear into the minds
of the populace; and our government will provoke a deadly
war with Iran that will spill onto our soil, starting with
a dirty-bomb attack at the 2008 Oscars. This campaign revolves
around the release of rock band Nine Inch Nails’ latest concept
album, Year Zero. And currently, the campaign has millions
of fans wrapped up in solving puzzles, making phone calls,
and even searching the bathroom stalls of venues NIN have
recently played looking for flash drives with leaked songs
from the album.
“Our
games would die without a community, in every single case,”
says Lee. “We don’t build a single-player game, and the reason
is part of the allure of these games is the experience of
finding a community. As passionate as you are about a particular
experience, the puzzles are too hard for a single person to
solve. Part of the fun is finding a larger community where
there might be an expert on 16th-century lute tablature who
can provide that skill set to the community.”
As part of a marketing campaign for Activision’s “Gun” video
game, 42 Entertainment developed a small side game as part
of its larger narrative. A Web site instructed players to
meet in graveyards around their communities to play poker
with tombstones. “We had a very simple formula to turn any
tombstone you saw into a playing card. The size of the tombstone
determined the color. . . . The last year of the death date
was the suit. Now, all of a sudden players could go to any
cemetery in the world and play Texas Hold ’Em in the cemetery.
We were getting pictures back from players all over the world
playing poker in these cemeteries, and they were cleaning
the tombstones as they go, making the entire space more pleasant
for those around them.”
Lee says viral marketing based on ARGs may eventually become
the standard rather than the exception in advertising. “The
age of ‘push information’ is dying. People have so many other
options, so many available technologies to allow them to put
on their blinders and miss all of it. So instead, what has
to replace that is its opposite: pull entertainment. People
are seeking out this marketing because it has value to them.”
ARGs may very well be the future of advertising, but at the
same time, their popularity and ability to hold consumers
in their sway may eventually lead to ARGs simply becoming
part of the experience of the product while it is on store
shelves, not just as hype builders before a product’s release.
“We
will see a lot of experimentation in that realm very soon,”
says Lee. “These games thrive in the real world. So if a game
were to rely on an album that is currently available, if it
encourages you to hold up the album insert to a flame, or
bend it to a certain way, or hold it up to the computer screen,
I mean, how much cooler is that game?”
dking@metroland.net
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