When you're going for the urban hipster market that is finally sick of apartment dwelling, you have to play on their turf. If you can find the horrors of living the "one man's ceiling is another man's floor" life and exploit them with well-executed humor and a fair amount of camp combined in a game environment, then you have the perfect recipe for reaching this group as they wile a way a few minutes (Okay, about 20 minutes in my case) trying to find the secret code that opens the garage door in the idyllic home on the hill that beckons with rainbows and angelic choirs accompanied by sweet songbirds and the happy plinking piano of yesteryear's family sitcoms.
But you have to search hard for the code, which, if you're like me and just HAVE to know what's behind the garage door, you'll spend a fair amount of time back in the dirty city, combing through the apartments above Smelly Jack's Garlic, Fish and Cheese Shop to find the clues. This allows you to uncover such gems as "The Boyfriend," a video apparently intended for viral distribution in which a young couple realizes the hard way that their little apartment is just a little too little. You'll also play "Avoid the Neighbor," a challenging little cat and mouse game peopled by some excellently stereotyped bad neighbors.
The bright layers, the clever soundscape and the video all work well together as Creative Priority draws in ING's coveted first-time homebuyer. THIS is how you engage your audience interactively. Sure, they know they're being sold to by a mortgage company, but it sure beats rooftops dancers on banner ads. When a company cares this much to show me a good time, I might be inclined to listen to their heavy pitch.
-- Dave Wilkie, VP, creative, Kinetic Results and author of the advertising blog Where's My Jetpack?
At one point or another, somewhere between graduation and retirement, one realizes that putting thousands of dollars per month into someone else's property while enduring noisy neighbors and other people's cooking smells is not the wisest investment of one's money. Even with the obvious argument in favor of it, getting a first mortgage is, frankly, terrifying.
ING's MoveUpMoveOut.com makes the argument against apartment living in spades. The site is broken into three target groups who are likely subjects for throwing off the shackles of rentaldom and investing in a property of their own. The site takes us through these three target groups' apartments, and finally to the glory of owning their own house.
This is an interesting way to present the argument for buying a first home, but it does very little in the way of telling visitors how they can move from complaining about their noisy neighbors to owning a house and being able to pay for it. The logical endpoint is the house on the hill, but it is dwarfed in comparison to the other elements of the interface. On my first visit to the site, I didn't even realize that I was expected to click on the house to end my journey. The site also contains some simple flash games that back up the argument against renting, but they seem tacked on.
MoveOutMoveUp succeeds at using a creative interactive environment to make a cogent argument, but I think that the flaw in execution is in focusing too much on that message and not enough on giving concrete information and tools. The focus seems to veer more towards entertaining than information, and though the site eventually takes you to the ING Direct mortgage site where you can calculate how much you can afford, it takes too long to get to that point.
-- Ryan Anderson, public relations manager, Fuel Industries
