Impression versus experience
True to the idea that gamers stay up late giving their consoles of choice a thorough workout, Doritos waited until 12:01 a.m. last Monday to announce the winner of its consumer-created advergame contest. The competition, announced last June, garnered 2,314 entries from chip-eating game enthusiasts. It boiled down to five semifinalists, and their ideas were realized in short beta online versions of their games.
"This entire experience has been wonderfully surreal," said Mike Borland, whose "Doritos Dash Of Destruction" -- featuring a Doritos-hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex and a truck filled with snacks -- won the most online votes to go on and become a full-fledged game by summer 2008.
Doritos, part of Frito Lay, is not the first big-name brand to create its own games for the console in an effort to appeal to hardcore players. Burger King's foray last year is the most famous example, with its three titles -- "Sneak King," "PocketBike Racer" and "Big Bumpin'" -- selling 3.2 million copies and increasing revenue for the quarter ending December 2006 by 9 percent, a spokesperson said. And Toyota's "Yaris" game, featuring a tentacle-enhanced version of the budget car, grabbed the marketing world's attention when it debuted last month.
But "Doritos Dash Of Destruction," to be downloaded for free over Xbox LIVE Arcade, is notable because it gets to the heart of why such games are a smart marketing move: interactivity between consumers and the brand. A gamer is so immersed in whatever he is playing that he won't always want to stop to read a banner ad, or to look very long at a product placed within the game. A contest letting consumers design the games they want to play takes their immersion into the brand a step further. "A gamer's dream," Borland called it.
It also amplifies what Nicole Lazzaro, founder and president of the game consultancy XEO Design, said is the benefit of creating a game from scratch: "It's impression versus experience -- you create an experience around the product."
Author notes: Eydie Cubarrubia is the marketing communications manager at mobileStorm, a digital marketing technology company. Read full bio.
