Curious about ARGs and how to use them in your campaign? Get the history of, and best uses for, this up-and-coming marketing technique.
Do you recall the scene in "The Matrix" when Morpheus says to Neo, "I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole."? As fans know, if Neo takes the red pill, he stays in Wonderland and Morpheus shows him how deep that rabbit hole goes.
In an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), the rabbit hole is the first puzzle-piece or event signaling the beginning. ARGs are becoming increasingly popular as platforms today for "alt-marketing" gurus. Major brands such as Microsoft, Hasbro, Jet Blue, American Express, Sharp, Audi, Song Airlines and Stella Artois beer are staking out space in the ARG arena.
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Alternate Reality Branding (ARB)
I bet you're familiar with lots of ARGs, and maybe you've even played in one or two and participated in an ARG offline event without even knowing who was sponsoring it, since that's one of the key tactics of ARG marketing or ARB (Alternate Reality Branding), as it's starting to be called. Often lumped into the term "all-inclusive campaigns," or "cross-platform promotions," ARBs are finally becoming a category of their own. Remember "I Love Bees," which looked like a small beekeeping business at first glance, but turned out to be a campaign to launch Microsoft's Halo 2 game? Or what about Audi's "Art of the Heist" designed by McKinney-Silver for Audi's A3? But unless you were part of the target audience, you may have missed Sharp Electronic's "The Legend of the Sacred Urns," and if you weren't in London last fall, you may not have seen Hasbro agencies' Tribal DDB and Tribal London use ARB tactics to turn the city into a "living" Monopoly Board to celebrate that board game's 70th anniversary.
Many more agencies and brands are starting to adapt ARG tactics of stealth marketing, microsites, big stakes contests and real world special events in a hybrid campaign to capture the cache of Augmented Reality Branding and encourage pull tactics that encourage players to tell the story to other players versus outdated "push" campaigns.
Blurring the lines
So just what is this 21st Century phenomena? Wikipedia.com explains-- an "Alternate Reality Game" is a cross media game that deliberately blurs the line between in-game and out-of-game experiences often being used as "a marketing tool for a product or service." Designing ARGs is both an art and a science. It can take months to a year to just design. It launches almost out of nowhere and then takes off, propelled seemingly only by WOM. In reality it is strongly supported by a well-planned infrastructure of cross-media. Before you delve in, you'll want to master the lingo: PuppetMasters-- the secret group that controls an ARG are behind the Curtain-- the layers of plot, technology and social contract between the players and the PuppetMasters. Players use a Guide-- a narrative of the experiences of gameplay, to discover clues and solve puzzles along a Trail-- a reference list of sites, clues and other items found during gameplay.
This is NOT a game!
During the adventure, avid followers and often innocent lookers are swept away on wild chases and quests across convincingly "real" but actually "faux" websites and real life (RL) locales. A multimedia mix of emails, microsites, text messages, IM, billboards, print and electronic ads draw the player into a fictional universe and virtual community. Thecrucial precept in Alternate Reality Games is the perception that "this is not a game." You don't want to tell the story; you want the players to tell it to each other.
New ARGs are launched almost every month, but few can match the success of Microsoft's ARG "I Love Bees," with three million players and a price tag of one million dollars. The campaign propelled the X-box video game Halo 2 into one of 2004's biggest hits. The designers of "I Love Bees," 42 Entertainment, are quoted as saying that they soon found that they weren't building games for individuals but for a "hive mind" composed of millions of walking, talking neurotransmitters that fast became a community online and off. The buzz lives on, and so does the website at www.Ilovebees.com. Last year, two years after the launch, players organized a Hivemeet in Chicago to relive the experience. A DVD compendium of "I Love Bees" was also released leading merchandisers to rethink how to "productize" other campaigns.
Alternate Reality Games may find their roots in role-playing from old text video games like "Zork" or in real-life geocaching GPS technology treasure hunts. Others point to improvisational theatre or performance art for inspiration. Film fans mention Silent Movie melodramas and modern magical realism tales like "Being John Malkovich"as sources. Jordan Weisman and Elan Lee (founders of 42 Entertainment) say their inspiration to create "The Beast," designed to expand on the themes of Steven Spielberg's "AI: Artificial Intelligence," was both Dungeons and Dragons and the Michael Douglas cult classic "The Game."
Dissect an ARG, and you'll find elements of immersive gaming, viral marketing, interactive fiction, social communities, virtual worlds and real-life publicity stunts that would make P.T. Barnum blush. Agency and brand budgets for online and new media continue to grow, but there is no source chronicling the rise of ARG advertising and sponsorship because the funds are often dispersed across such silos as special events, promotion, guerilla marketing and sweepstakes budgets. One indicator that there is plenty of opportunity for growth in the ARG space and evolving spin-offs is the growth of experience marketing. According to the Chicago-based IEG Sponsorship surveys, North American companies spent an estimated $5 billion of their $11.1 billion events budget on experiential marketing in 2004 with a projected 25 percent increase forecast annually beginning last year.
ARG Spin-Offs Growing
Inspired by the success of Alternate Reality Games, new spin-offs are capturing attention and funding. Most of these "mash-ups" include some elements of ARGs, but the curtain and the puppetmasters are often visible so ARG purists will insist they are outside of that box. The new "categories" that I see evolving include experiences that might be better termed Extended Reality, Mega-Reality, Alternative Reality, Collective Reality and Faux-reality. Here are some examples:
Extended Reality Games (ERGs) extend the drama, excitement and characters from films and television shows with a combo of online and offline experiences and adventures that span far beyond the norm. Some ERGs are created by entertainment brands or networks and studios while others are designed by the sponsors. The remake of the 1963 "Pink Panther" film opened the door for European smart car to feature its smartfortwo in a leading role as Inspector Clouseau's police car. Pink Panther aficionados are invited to "Pick up the Trail" and hunt for the stolen diamond at www.smart.com/pinkpanther. Online a lavish internet special draws players into a 3D and photo realistic experience where Inspector Clousseau personally greets them. Smart says that players are spending an amazing 10 minutes driving through the interactive indoor and outdoor scenes from the film gathering clues and tracking the thief and win a chance to be a finalist in a Paris smart fortwo road rally to track down the "diamond" in real life. What's so amazing is that the site continues to draw long after the American premiere of "Pink Panther," extending both the smart brand and feeding the post-audience appetite for even more Clousseau as a prelude to the European movie launch. In this case smart, not the studio, created the ARB experience.
Television is fast recognizing the value of Extended Reality experiences. One of the classics is the campaign for Sci-Fi Channel's "5ive Days to Midnight" mini-series that wowed even sage New Yorkers when something called the Buck Naked bar, featuring a young woman dancer gyrating on a silver pole, turned up in front of a Union Square shop window. Turned out it wasn't a scene from a movie or a lingerie promo but rather a live billboard designed by Seattle-based creative marketing shop Neverstop to recreate the opening scene of the upcoming "5ive Days to Midnight" mystery.
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