Snapshot campaigns
ARGs are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex and can cost more than $1 million to roll out, although the average cost is generally between $500,000 and $1 million. Here are a few examples:
Xenophile Media, a two-time Emmy-award winning production company based in Toronto, Canada, recently rolled out two campaigns:
- XPOD: Based on author Douglas Coupland's novel "JPOD" and a TV series adapted into cyberspace. The campaign launched Feb. 29 for the CBC and includes weekly episodes, games and a live event; the objective is to deepen the overall "JPOD" online experience, ratchet up publicity for the TV series and drive traffic to the broadcaster's site.
- M.I. High -- Whack the Mole!: An extension of the second season of BBC's 'tween' series, "M.I. High." Each week following the program, viewers are directed online via one of several on-air marketing campaigns. Patrick Crowe, co-president of Xenophile Media, says the goal of the campaign, started Jan. 7, is to create an immersive online experience for a 'tween demographic that will encourage brand loyalty over the 13-week series deployment and beyond. Users become Field Agents, receive Mission briefings from series characters, play flash-based games and solve online puzzles. Crowe says there have been 25,000+ new registered users weekly and a conversion rate of more than 50 percent from TV to online.
The Vanishing Point: Last year 42 Entertainment created the first global trans-media puzzle game to celebrate the release of Windows Vista and reward tech savvy consumers. The game spanned four weeks as players worked together to decipher embedded clues in real world events and solve puzzles online to win a trip to outer space.
Real world events contained embedded secret messages and codes, such as creating a Bellagio fountain show suddenly "hacked" by a mysterious puzzle-master, Loki, at CES. Players found cryptic clues written in the skies, on architectural projections that transformed world landmarks and coded in a unique fireworks show -- clues that were captured in real time through photographs or video before they reached "the vanishing point" and uploaded to the website.
These events took place in 12 major cities around the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Germany and Singapore. Online communities of players developed that worked together to solve the puzzles, and created resources such as forums, photo/video archives, online hints and even web-radio stations that broadcast in real time during the live events. "The Vanishing Point" ultimately involved more than one million players and 20 million consumers.
World Without Oil: A joint project of Public Broadcasting Service's Independent Lens and its Electric Shadows web-original programming. This focused on a real-world problem -- solving a global oil shortage. Launched in April 2007, it was recently awarded the Best Activist Game at the SXSW Game Conference in Austin, TX. The game lasted 33 days; 1,850 players registered on the World Without Oil site where, inspired by fictional news accounts of a severe energy crisis, they contributed blogs, videos, emails, images and voicemails to an expanding user-generated narrative. There were 60,000 unique visitors by June 1; the archived game continues to draw about 6,000 monthly visitors.