Anonymous - Viral, Crime 360 game campaign stunt etc.
The concept: Create a viral marketing campaign for the Crime 360 series on the CI channel world-wide. The "game" would act more like an Augment Reality experience versus a game with set goals, participants would be lead to the site via a mysterious spots on the channel and hints on various third-party sites: youtube, myspace and facebook. We would purchase SEO terms to lead users searches to our hidden site and once you entered the site, you would get periodical emails and chat request from the "tipster" the AI of the game to guide you through the experience to solve the murder mystery. The overall goal was to get tune in and brand awareness for the CI brand and Crime 360 show. ( the character was a big fan of both and referenced both in the clues he provided to the users.)
Tools
- 10 - 30 second promo's: Viral spots on TV and youtube
- fake blog updated by the tipster
- Purchased words in google to lead to the site and show
- Emails to unlock parts of the game.
- A 10 day timeline of events for every player, with clues sent from the tipster to the user's email account.
- hacked secret page in the regular show sites for 360
- false myspace pages for the characters
- A Facebook page with leads
- A beautiful site designed and developed by none-other than Firstborn
Site Design by Firstborn
Development Pod Design (after firstborn - we had to re develop it more on that below)
Campaign and spot Design: Curtis Birch
Viral seeding and Marketing: (Different by market)
It took 5 agencies, not including our internal creative and tech departments 6 months to develop, then another 3 months to launch in the different languages and six cultures (We adapted the game for asia, Australia, Latin America, etc). i learned a lot on this project, my analysis is below (After the pretty pictures).
So how did it do? Well...ish. When a certain type of person found this they were addicted till the game or "experience" ended (marketing was very against the term game). The Facebook page dedicate to hints and clues blew up with comments and threads in different languages and cultures. Out side of the campaign creative sparkle (i think we won some award somewhere for this) it was an awfully lot of money for not a lot of eyeballs. The site was hard to find, not part of the core brand site, and when it did well, it did well out side of the Brand site environment, in this case CI and therefore didn't add additional Page views or uniques to our core offering.
To create it was a disasters. Firstborn made a beautiful experience but delivered it before we were done laying out the entire experience, hence i hired the reliable Pod design to work with me to re architect the entire experience and backend again... which was surprising hard, since the "experience" was based on a 10 day serial based on the users actions during those 10 days on other sites and email delivered clues. This ten-day clue release cycle was based by user, so tons of cookies, email blasts, tracking different clues at different time to different people. Exhausting, for something that didn't scale.