Alternate Reality Game – A Sucess Story “The Lost Experience”

Before getting into the details of the highly successful interactive marketing campaign, I will first try to put int some stuff on what is an Alternate Relaity Game : The wiki definittion for an ARG is as simple as -

“An alternate reality game (ARG), is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions.”

You can read more on the details of ARG on its Wiki : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

What we will find in the case to be discussed is that it effectively incorporate the following principles:

• Integrates all aspects of media elements intelligently
• People are urged to participate not for the one big prize
• Great storyline to make sure that people are kept engaged through out the promo period and not just during the exposure of the Ad, and this makes it really valuable for the brand

I found a nice process based illustration of an ARG shared on slideshare, which I think really illustrates how ARG’s can be visualized by marketing team.

Progression of an ARG

Towards the beginning of the third season of the popular american TV Series –  “Lost” broadcasted by ABC along with channel 4 and Seven Network launched what they called “The Lost Experience” , which was launched in co-operation with over 20 broadcasters , making it the biggest ARG series based on a television series.

TLE was web based game based on the Lost series and the concept for ABC was to create a parallel story behind Lost which will engage the viewers and non- viewers to participate to find out the truth. There were no prizes which made it more interesting, more and more people were inolved in this game not for the prizes but for the satisfaction of solving the puzzle and connecting the clues given out. Videos were posted on the website http://thelostexperience.com.

Interesting videos like the one below were used for giving clues to help the characters solve the mystery.

The game was divided into 5 phases, with ad spots in between the Lost showtime, on the fictitious companies which were featured in the Lost series. This gave a real look for the search and people got ivolved in the whole thing. You can read more on the exact reality show here.

The game was a huge success that it raised the TRP’s of the Lost Series 3 and the marketing team achieved the critical target of engaging with the target audience, it was even reported that toll free  phone lines associated with the game was jammed after it was first aired in Europe.

I think this is a great case study  for marketing students and managers who are looking at coming out with an ARG plan and loads of learnings in terms of developing an integrated strategy with Blogs, Online Media, TV, Print, Outdoors , Telecalling included in the plan. It will be a nice idea to get hold of this case for research purpose.

ABC sure has a great case reference and definitely has not Lost it as far as ARG’s go  :)

Adtech Webcast by Aaron Goldman

 

Couple of weeks back I attended a webcast by Aaron Goldman, Managing Partner, Connectual, on the top 10 hottest areas in Digital Marketing:

Some highlights from the session:

Biggest Mistake in Digital Marketing : Getting into Digital without research and listening

Agencies after 5 yrs: Digital agencies will have to move higher up the ladder towards Ideation and Managing Brand

Business Models: Delivery and Technology is as important as the message and so Agencies need to evolve themselves from creation of message to delivery through the digital medium.

Reaching consumers throughout their Media Day

I came across a very good visual on how much digital should change the marketers view of the  consumers, especially the digital migrants and working population of 25+.

I can completely connect myself to this particular visual, May be a lot more of you can as well.

Just confirming my belief in digital, an old quote from Media baron Rupert Murdoch –“I dont know anybody under 30 who has ever looked at a classified advertisement in a newspaper”

Crisis of Myspace or have they got of it?

Myspace.com is a pioneer in the social networking website space, but we are seeing it slowly move out of this space especially with the huge competition from Facebook in the past 2 – 3years.  I was wondering how could a website which had a market share of over 80% in US just lose traffic, there has to be some basic learning which we should take out of the Taylor curve( Not exactly taylor yet) of this social networking site to understand this transition of the website.

Before:                                             Now:

The strategy adopted by most of the social networking sites have been like Mark Zuckerberg says– “Growth is primary, revenue is secondary” The model has been working for facebook from a growth point of view where Facebook is doing great but its high time that they start looking into the revenue bit, its really unbelievable that a company with over 200 million customers is not generating profits.  But in the case of  Myspace the issue has not only been from a revenue point of view but also from growth point of view especially considering the fact that they have not been able to leverage the first mover advantage in this space.

Problems Myspace had/has

• User Design – There is a very nice post on the problems with Myspace design http://carsonified.com/blog/features/design/the-myspace-problem/
• Lack of stickiness factor
• Unable to crack any new models for advertisers unlike FB which keeps innovating( though not all work) but the fact that the company is doing things to keep the community engaged in its portal has been the key
• Architecture of FB applications has been a killer and myspace was a slow mover in terms of releasing API’s for external websites to connect up. FB connect is now more far reaching in that aspect
• Differentiating itself in the social network era

What are they doing?

• Myspace Music – Its one of the most wanted properties in Myspace now, especially because of the tie-ups with some good records
• Entry into Music is a great opportunity for Myspace to tap into a Niche of Social Music Community, which can be a potential growth multiplier

Now what about Monetising? Here is an interesting snippet on Myspace  :

Myspace:

Numbers also show it clearly that the key is to crack the monetization for these networks. Innovative Ad models always seem to be the way ahead, but a transaction  i.e. social commerce led model will definitely be something to look out for.

So, How do you think they will be get out of the crisis or have they already cracked a way to get out? Is Music going to lead it? Or something else?

Birth of Online Communities, tipping point etc.

Taking forward my previous post on online communities. Just going through the ways some of the bigger community birth to tipping point.

When we go through the history of how a lot of these communities were born, we will find something interesting. Listing down the stuff on some of the ones which I classified in the last post.

Going through this list of things, there is one common thing which we see, its that the biggest online communities in the world were born out of a personal need or hobby projects or just by chance. None of them actually was out of some VC sitting in silicon valley butchering down ideas and business models to carve out the perfect way to make money. There is one important factor in all of these things, its bringing about the “Stickiness Factor” for the people to stay on the page. Every entrepreneur around the world is trying to find that one stickiness factor that can build this community.

Some of the things which needs to be looked while building a community:

• Putting the members first – Don’t listen to VC’s
• Find ways to use the first mover advantage
• Try to understand what really causes the network effect for your community
• Start off with very less features, because people may not really be in your community for the feature. ie. the feature may not really be the “Stickiness Factor”
• Keeping talking to your community, leverage the power. Engage with them at a 1-to-1 level of communication

Hopefully made some sense.

Defining Online Communities

I had a very interesting session on building online communities last week, with loads of learnings.

I will be covering each of stuff in the upcoming posts: Planning to roughly divide them in the following structure:

1. Defining an online community
2. Growing and Reaching the tipping point
3. Maturity and the eBay diffusion model

All these have been taken from various materials shared by our Prof. David   at IE. The discussion was predominantly around eBay as David was the Head of eBay Europe so we did get a lot of dope on its success and how they managed the communities.

We had discussions on the following communities:

Wikipedia, Digg, Youtube,eBay, Paypal, Threadless , Skype, Yahoo Messenger,

Napster, Skype, Vuze, Myspace, Facebook

We divided all the above in the following framework as shown, but as we head towards a social commerce era, we are seeing the communities trying to get out of its key stickiness factor and do what other also do.

Is that the way to go for social communities, where they act as the supermarket for all community interactions. May be. May be not.

I will take up each of them separately over the next 2-3 weeks to put in something of my own.

Threadless.com – Participate, Shop and have fun

Its been sometime since my last post, been busy with loads of assignments at IE and work stuff eating the rest of my time.

Here is something interesting for companies who are really wondering on things to do to build a community. This example is of threadleass.com- a tshirt company. If you are wondering what a tshirt company is doing in a digital marketing blog, its simply because they made a $30 Million without an investor backing, and used the web as a sourcing partner.  A model which everyone talks a lot about- Crowdsourcing.

The slide share presentation would give you a better idea on what I am talking about:

The second last slide talks about why this company came out to be special for me:

• Its not just Web 2.0 where ppl talk a lot just about technology and stuff
• More than a community – Its about creating a Fan base!
• Engaging and Playful – Great promotions , Great brand engagement tactics
• Its big business $$ – $30 Million without any of those VC’s to harass you
• Quality – Good communication to customers, asking right questions for better stock management
• No big investor backing! – Ya I keep saying this.
• No Harvard guys in here

If you found it interesting, do mention it somewhere in your community

BTW expect a lot more postings, as I got a summer break at IE right now from this friday on. Happy Sharing.

Metaverses and Advergaming Strategy for Online Travel and Airliners

Last week I worked on metaverses and advergaming strategy for Air france. I think this doc should help a lot of online travel companies and other airline companies. It was difficult to find stuff on the company and marketing budgets, but with some assumptions and math did come up with a neat enough proposal.

Here is an extract of my report:

“The typical customer lifecycle for the travel industry can be described as per the image below:

Figure 1 : Customer Relationship Cycle

In the case of travel companies, the most important driver of revenues and booking patterns is the Loyalty and Awareness of the offers, and it has been seen that customers are beginning to be more and more demanding and less loyal, especially when we look at some of the key points raised at the Microsoft Travel Marketing summit June’ 09. The highlight of the discussion point – “there has been 19% decline in brand loyal travelers between 2006 and 2008.”

Looking from this angle the strategy adopted by Air France at a high level seems to follow this pattern:

• Generating high branding and awareness – Air France has just gone through a complete re branding activity The SVP of Corporate communication of Air France in his press release – “This new graphic identity aims to communicate what Air France is today: a company loyal to its national identity and to the values to which it is attached, but also becoming—most notably through the creation of the Air-France KLM group—a global brand with half of its clients being from countries other than France”
• Keeping the right mix is the key – Brand versus Performance Advertising
• Showcase travel safety especially after the recent crash

Detailed report : Check out the slide share document

Comments and Critics are welcome. Let me know on the room for improvement.

How do you choose a Search Engine Optimization Agency for your company?

We had a great discussion last week on choosing a search engine optimization agency for companies and we laid out a guideline document as to how this can be done. Coming up with a typical RFP for search was one of our key objectives, I think we did a good job with that .

So, here goes..

Key Selection Criteria

• The agency is high on integrity and transparent. The commitment of the agency towards not using Black Hat SEO techniques is a critical selection criteria.
• The agency can demonstrate a structured approach to keyword analysis to identify and select relevant keywords and groups of related keywords for our markets and are able to identify the potential vo-lume of visitors for each keyword.
• The agency uses industry best practice. It has the right technical skills and can provide examples of previous success for clients in SEO.
• The agency will openly describe the strategies and techniques they will use to approach SEO and why they believe they are better in their capabilities than rivals.
• The agency has a performance-based approach to SEO with the reporting to readily show the volume and quality of traffic generated through this activity.
• The agency has experience working with in-house development teams, knowledge sharing and best practices for out sourcing.

Evaluation Matrix

Sl.No.	Evaluation Criteria	Key Points which will be evaluated for?	Weightage	Scale
1	Business and Online marketing Team Expertise of the company	Experience of the Management Team Years in Business Online Marketing Experience of the company	5%	0-5
2	Experience of the company with SEO Projects	Experience SEO Team in Years Number of SEO Projects handled in terms of Large, Medium and Small Successful Case Studies	20%	0-5
3	Process Compliance or Outsourcing Model	Process and Approach to Outsourcing Best Practices involved in specific SEO related activities like Keyword Analysis, Off and On Portal optimization etc.	10%	0-5
4	Referrals	Referral from Clients in the same industry Issues faced during SEO activities Integrity of dealing with the company	10%	0-5
5	Communication Model and Proximity with the Company	Proximity of the company to Offices Communication Model and Team structure for escalating issues Demonstrated experience with working with web development partners of customer	5%	0-5
6	Integration with Other Online Marketing activities	Experience in integrating SEO with other online based marketing activities Demonstrated Case Studies	5%	0-5
7	Innovation	Any Previous case study or client referral that demonstrated innovation in SEO techniques	5%	0-5
8	Professionalism	Timely Submission of Proposals and responsiveness to requests	5%	0-5
9	Service Agreement	No Hidden costs in the agreement -Clear lay out of support related SLA’s -Well defined billing cycles	10%	0-5
10	Cost	Competitive pricing within the budget	25%	0-5
	Total		100%	0-5

Note:

• Score for each criteria will be on the basis of the judgment of the Evaluation team
• General pattern for the score will be: 0- Not Applicable or Not Submitted, 1 – Very Poor, 2 – Poor, 3 – Average, 4- Good and 5- Excellent
• Scenario in which the agency scores are the same, an executive decision will be made on the basis of quality of referrals and SEO case studies submitted

I know its looks good and covers all the things required, but then when will the marketing departments understand that SEO is not an IT activity but a pure marketing activity and that they need to actually consider the points mentioned for choosing the right vendor. But they will all learn may be not now but definitely in the future after some falls

SEO Take Away Guide

After the last session on search optimization some of my group members at IE put together this document on SEO. I think its well laid out and a simple document explaining SEO black hat techniques.

SEO managers do check out.

Let me know your views on this.

PS: Thanks to Eduardo, Sussane, Filipe, Carlton and Gonzalo for the effort to put it up. Big thanks to Rodrigo( our prof) to push to get this together.