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  🙂

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.

Dove Campaign for Beauty – a 59’ Slide Cast

As a part of the course, I was working on a 59 second podcast on a successful Viral Marketing Campaign. Chose the Dove Campaign for Beauty.

Some of the things that struck me about this “Successful” campaign:

• Very High views for videos over 2 million per video but fewer ratings, only around 0.1% of viewers rated the videos
• Youtube videos were not managed by the unilever team!
• No Social media connect at all
• Loads of sporadic groups not maintained properly in Facebook,
• The green peace organization video was simple awesome, think this was more successful – it got Unilever to take action in April 2008 on the palm oil usage by the company

Dove Onslaught by Green Peace Organization

Well, I thought using the Slidecast feature in Slideshare would be a good idea, and yes it indeed was.

Here is my first Slidecast:

Viral Marketing Campaigns

View more OpenOffice presentations from Rahul Nambiar.

Everyone should try the slide cast feature, it is fun and easy.

PS:Did not spend a lot of time on synchronization but the tool works really well. Wish I had a better Microphone to record, may be next time 🙂