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Alternative Reality Gaming | The next big marketing thing?
As viral marketing campaigns expand in scope to include Alternate Reality Gaming or Entertainment (ARG/ARE), marketers have begun adding suspense, mystery and intrigue as must-haves in their marketing campaigns to lure their target audience into “buying” their products. The latest example to create a stir would be monster movie “Cloverfield”. Six months before the movie premiered, a mysterious, untitled trailer played right before Transformers, causing a huge frenzy among movie-goers eager to find out more. Over the next few months, authentic looking corporate websites, fake MySpace profiles of the characters in the film and news clips started pouring through various sources, providing clues and constantly feeding and generating massive hype for the movie. Cloverfield eventually launched to critical and box-office success, earning US$41 million over its opening weekend in the United States alone. The movie was made with US$25 million, a minimal amount by today’s standards. Now, is the use of ARG restricted to purely movies? After all, it’s easy to create back stories to support the main storyline in the movie, but to do that for a product? Is it possible, feasible, and viable? The answer is Yes! And there is a good case study to back it up. The Art of the Heist is an alternate reality game created to promote the Audi A3, launched in the US in 2005. In short, the game revolved around a team of art retrievers trying to stop the world’s greatest art heist, and tracking down an extremely coordinated theft team. The game started with a security camera recording of a shadowy villain planting pieces of information inside 6 different Audi A3 cars. The cars were then stolen, and had to be tracked down, and their respective data pieced together to reveal the entire scope of the art heist. A huge mix of media was deployed to support the campaign, including fake corporate websites for the art retrieval company. Strategic blogs were set up and classified ads placed to provide clues, break-in videos posted on rich media sites such as ifilm and Atom films. “Missing” signboards were placed at Audi showrooms to provide for a realistic approach to the campaign, to allow participants to be immersed in the game. At the end of the 3 month campaign, over 2 million unique users logged in to the Audi USA website, 500,000 took part in the story, over 4,000 test drives resulted from the campaign, and 10,000 leads were passed on to dealers. Not to mention a huge brand recall. Granted the United States is a much bigger market than Singapore, but with such figures dangling in front of you, I’m sure, as an astute marketer, you would want to find out more, and probably even test to see if something like this can work locally or on a regional basis. And with calls for marketing campaigns to be measured against ROI, the wide array of online media used for these campaigns will no doubt aid in enabling measurable results back to the marketer. A detailed case study of the Audi A3 campaign can be found at http://www.mckinney.com/A3_H3ist/
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This intel was contributed by vinyarb
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May, 2012
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