Creative Agency: The Visionaire Group
Over the last five years it has become routine for rich media ads to stream video, offer downloads and allow users to play games inside of banners. Essentially we have been creating micro-sites inside of ads. The "Pirates" embedded website banner takes the next step and provides the entire website.
The goal of the banner was to provide the best possible experience for the end user, advertiser and publisher. By embedding the website directly into the banner, it eliminates the interruption of leaving the current page the user is browsing, allows marketers to get their entire online message instead of a micro-message across and keeps the user on the publisher's website so they can continue consuming more pages and ads on their site. The last point is important as it was crucial in getting sites to adopt this new format and allow them to run on their sites.
Media Banners has a patent pending on the Embedded Website Banner process.
-- Dimitry Ioffe, CEO, MediaBanners.com, a division of The Visionaire Group
I am always grateful when movie assets are put to good use in a first-person experience rather than tiny video boxes. Expansive set photography is brought to life with careful flourishes like flickering candles and billowing fog. The symphonic score is well timed to my input, producing something that feels like a narrative arc, in a banner ad of all things. The Disney flair for attention to detail shines through in this experience.
The magnitude and ambition of this micro-site is mostly managed well, with clear design to help you through the complex story. There were times when it got away from me, though. The gentle mouse tracking creates the sense of a bigger canvas but it also made it hard for me to click on my target. I needed a minute to get my sea legs, but I was able to finish the quest with few frustrations. One baffling aspect of this very well-crafted site is that it lives behind a banner click with very little enticement on rollover to invite me in. I am still gun-shy, like many web browsers, of clicking a banner unless I am very sure what to expect. Let's hope this rich experience doesn't remain buried treasure.
-- Chad Currie, creative director, T3
Arrrrrrrrr. Shiver me timbers, this is a good looking micro-site. And that will be the end of my attempts at bad pirate humor.
Truth be told, I haven't seen any of the "Pirates" movies, and that could definitely have been a handicap for me. I wasn't exactly clear on what a lot of the objects in the site were, and why I should click on them. I know the site wasn't designed just to poke around endlessly, but I wasn't able to discern what the "object of the game" was. Jack has one of the "pieces of eight" somethings, but finding the other seven required some serious exploration. The clues that I stumbled upon weren't much help, either. Again, maybe if I'd seen the other two movies, I'd have had a better understanding, but I think that a promotional site should stand on its own to some degree.
Jack Sparrow's compass, which for some odd reason seemed to sit below the edge of my browser window, didn't provide much in the way of direction, but I eventually began to explore the different sections, like the Singapore Harbor, Davey Jones' Locker and the Port Royal. The character Tia warned me, "The navigational charts lead to many places, but only for those who know their secrets." Alas, I did not. But I did manage to find pieces, which seem to be coins, and make some progress. Not knowing who the characters were when I was told to go see a specific person definitely hurt my progress.
I also found the Pirates micro-site to be a bit challenging to navigate, not just in what to do, but in keeping objects open so that you could click on them. Moving the mouse made the entire site scroll, making it difficult to center objects or keep them highlighted.
The trailer, clips and featurettes were of the highest quality. Every movie's promotional site should look this good. The transitions between areas of the site looked beautiful, with crisp, colorful video clips, including the flowing waterfall, which would normally suffer from the encoding process. Significantly better than most of the other larger format video I've seen.
Beyond the navigational portion of the site, there was a simple menu that offered all of the usual movie site fare. Buddy icons, screensavers for Windows and OS X (well, coming soon). Most useful, the bottom of the site had a list of my local theaters and showtimes displayed throughout the entire site. I assume they are using geo-targeting to determine which theaters are within five miles of my office, and it was pretty accurate for the first few listings, but definitely beyond five miles for the last few.
Overall, though, the "Pirates" site is worth its weight in gold.
-- Corey Kronengold, director of corporate communications, Tremor Media