Creative Agency: Zipatoni
The converged awareness campaign includes product integration (for both AIM and Chrysler), an AOL mobile instant messaging trivia game, a movie-making blog on AIM.com and a casual multi-player desktop game called Cry_Wolf the Game.
AOL then teamed with Wadlow to create a buzz-building campaign to reach young people, horror fans and movie-goers through the communications and content services they use every day. Cool interactive elements were designed to reach them via a twisted trivia game on their mobile phones, a blog, an interactive game, an online advertising campaign and an AIMCryWolf IM "buddy."
AOL's multi-faceted, interactive movie tie-in campaign included:
In the true spirit of the internet, people are cheating. The wolves are emailing doctored screenshots to confuse the sheep, and there’s been a rumor of a game hack floating around. When an audience takes over and redefines the experience, you’ve gone beyond promotion and pointed yourself toward something great, or you’ve shot yourself in the foot. For a short-term promotion such as this, the cheating won’t have time to get absurd while the promotion is still relevant.
I haven’t seen “Cry Wolf,” but I’d be willing to bet that its online promotion has more going for it than the movie does.
For me, this promotion has taken another “lost in the oversaturated horror market” movie and made its name stand out. I won’t see this movie in the theater, but I will definitely, without doubt, see part of it on TV in two and a half years. And I will look back fondly on it’s promotion, which most likely deserved to be related to a more interesting film.
-- Brian Linder, art director, Click Here
At first glance the site looks clear and easy to understand -- a link to the right takes you to the movie site and trailer, a click anywhere else takes you into the game.
You are then brought to a login screen where you need to have an AIM login (which most people today in internet advertising have!) There was a Chrysler ad on the right and I thought it was a Chrysler-sponsored game. After login you get to choose where you want to play -- the bio lab, cafeteria, Chapel, computer lab, library or pool.
I hopped into the pool room. Up to this point the graphics were basic photos and the load times were exceptionally slow. For some reason they used https which is geek speek for a commerce enabled site. I don’t know why as there was no (visible) commerce and the load required saying you were ok with unsecured sites.
Finally after login, the cool, lounge music started to play. A bit odd as there was silence with the previous two screens. I found myself in a chat interface with a bunch of current games and players in the “pool.” I had no idea what to do. Another recently joined person asked “what do we do?” Then I figured it out, I clicked “Join a Game.” You then pick a player picture ( I was the “Gossip”) and wait for enough people for a game to begin. The music went on. I waited with bated breath as to what a game with 20 people in a pool would be all about.
When everyone joins it tells you to “lie to your friends and eliminate your enemies.” I was waiting for some sort of graphical game experience but instead you got labeled as either a “wolf” or a “sheep” and you had to figure out who was who through just AIM chat. Frankly it was a lame experience where most people were chatting about, well, what you’d expect they would chat about in a chat room!
To me this idea was cool, had promise but was executed poorly. If you viewed the video walk-through, it was well thought out, but the execution lacked any graphics and was unimaginative. I still didn’t get why Chrysler was in it -- were they a sponsor or just an advertiser? In any case, this is a good case study to view to know how one can improve on a mediocre experience.
-- Mark Friedler, CEO, GameDAILY