Alternate Reality Game and Commercial Directors
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.
Viral marketing and viral advertising : marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to increase brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word of mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive flash games, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.
ARG’s are becoming great promotional tools, as proven by 42 Entertainment who created the ARG for video game Halo 2 and Nine Inch Nails album “Year Zero.” Halo’s popular ARG, I Love Bees, was part of a viral marketing campaign to promote Halo 2. The game involves people visiting sites thought to be involved with the game, documenting information, and sharing info with other players. The game was originally initiated when participants of other ARGs recieved a plastic honeybear in the mail filled with honey and 9 vinyl letters that spell I LOVE BEES when unscrambled. At the same time, an advertisement for halo 2 during the screening of I,Robot flashed a quick card saying ilovebees.com. People who visited the site at first saw a site related to beekeeping. The apparent owner of the site started blogging about glitches in her website, and if anyone could help her. This was then followed by strange sentence fragments and coding popping up all over the site. The game eventually came to a conclusion, and the plot of the game was revealed to all.
A much more elaborate ARG is Trent Reznor’s (NIN) Year Zero which promotes his concept album of the same title. Year Zero describes a dystopia based off Reznor’s feelings towards the Bush administration. This game started as a worldwide treasurehunt. The first clue was found on the back of NIN’s Brazil tour t-shirts. Discolored letters led people to a site filled with warped text and images caused by what appears to be a broken transmission.
“Next, a USB drive was found during one of their gigs containing a leaked track off that album, but more intriguingly was the few seconds of static preceding it, which when analyzed with a spectrogram, revealed more clues. Yes, a freaking spectrogram. Needless to say the rest of the campaign was equally compelling, challenging fans to seek more hidden messages involving more images, Morse codes, the combination of stereo tracks into mono, timecodes, etc, leading to a chain of websites all set in the reality of Year Zero.”
All this led up to the release of the album, Year Zero, which in itself was a clue. The album contained a thermochrome cd, which changed colors from black to white. The white cd held more cryptic clues.
The game’s been going on since Feb. 12 2007, and is expected to run for about 18th months.
These games are incredibly interesting and keep people involved for a long period of time. I heard about this from a friend who is both a big fan of Halo and NIN. The viral marketing obviously works, since it’s been spread to me by word of mouth, and now to you via Internet.
One other thing I wanted to share, is a Japanese movie directed by award-winning commercial directors Gen Sekiguchi (as director) and Taku Tada (as screenwriter). The movie, Survive Style 5+, features a character who is also a CM director. The movie shows her randomly inspired CMs which are in fact failed commercials from the two directors.
This one’s a little vulgar, just get over it.
