You generally get to hear about major scale, high spend advertising campaigns. Recently, Samsung has re-branded an airport terminal itself to promote it's high end smart phone, the S5. Though this is an extremely expensive campaign, I am a bit skeptical about how much customer engagement this really generates.
Now, I am going to talk about two other really expensive advertising campaigns, both in the Video Game industry, that has successfully generated a huge crowd response, and involved a lot of customer engagement.
Mass Effect 3: Space Edition
The third installment in BioWare's hugely successful Mass Effect franchise was much awaited by millions of fans. To give a very brief background context about the game, it is set in space and involves you, as a human, to embark on inter-galactic travel and interact with alien species, to win their support in helping you fight off an impending doomsday attack by an ancient alien. As such, the entire game is set in space. The attention to detail, and the high quality of the game led to a very large consumer base for this franchise.
On the run up to the launch of the third installment in the series, BioWare announced the Space Edition of the game. A week prior to the official release of the normal edition game, they would release six copies of the Space Edition into the air using high-altitude weather balloons. The games are encased in specifically designed payloads, including HD cameras and GPS monitors that will help gamers track and secure the copies. The cities selected for the campaign were San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, London, Paris and Berlin. The game website provided the calendars with the launch dates in each of these cities, and also up-to-date tracking information of the game copies.
Hundreds of hard core gamers set up camp in places they expected the copies to land in. After all, who would not want to lay their hands on a copy of such a specially launched game? This ad campaign generated a huge buzz in the gaming community, and Mass Effect 3 released to one of the best openings in its time, leading to sales of millions of copies of the game.
Watch Dogs
This is a soon to be launched, much hyped and much awaited product by Ubisoft. The game's setting is about a government refuge who gets falsely implicated in a conspiracy, and loses his wife in the ensuing events. He sets out to take revenge using technology. He uses his mobile phone to hack and access anything over the internet at the swipe of a finger. The player controlling him can take over street cameras, hack into ATMs, unlock cars, turn off the power grid, and just about anything you can think of.
Now, in order to promote this, Ubisoft set up a mobile repair shop on a street corner, and deployed one of their men to run it. When people walk in to get their phones repaired, he goes into the back of the shop, and comes out in a few minutes telling them that he installed a special software for free for them. To give a demo, he touches a button on the phone and the lights in the shop go off. He touches again and the lights come back on. This piques the customer's interest. He then takes them out of the shop, and walks over to a parked car and swipes on the phone again. The car unlocks and the alarms set off. He switches the alarm off using his phone too. He then takes the customer over to an ATM, and by using the phone yet again, the machine starts spewing out cash and people on the footpath rush to collect the notes.
By now, the customer is truly amazed. The man then hands over the phone to them, and directs them to use the software. When the customer touches a button, all the street lights on the road go off. Then he points them to the traffic lights, and when the customer uses the phone, all the lights go green. Cars on the road go berserk, and meet with an accident. The police soon turn up, and the man points to the customer and tells the cops that this person was responsible. The cops come over to the scared customer, take the phone from their hands, and show the screen to them.
The phone reads, "You have just experienced what all you can do in Ubisoft's WatchDogs". The customer is left speechless.
Now, which person in the world, whether a gamer or not, will not buy this game just by knowing that they were a part of it?
I have recently read a news article about these game developers who have gone ahead and put real world people from the streets into the game world. Now if I happened to be in the game, I would love to go buy it!
Now, I am going to talk about two other really expensive advertising campaigns, both in the Video Game industry, that has successfully generated a huge crowd response, and involved a lot of customer engagement.
Mass Effect 3: Space Edition
The third installment in BioWare's hugely successful Mass Effect franchise was much awaited by millions of fans. To give a very brief background context about the game, it is set in space and involves you, as a human, to embark on inter-galactic travel and interact with alien species, to win their support in helping you fight off an impending doomsday attack by an ancient alien. As such, the entire game is set in space. The attention to detail, and the high quality of the game led to a very large consumer base for this franchise.
On the run up to the launch of the third installment in the series, BioWare announced the Space Edition of the game. A week prior to the official release of the normal edition game, they would release six copies of the Space Edition into the air using high-altitude weather balloons. The games are encased in specifically designed payloads, including HD cameras and GPS monitors that will help gamers track and secure the copies. The cities selected for the campaign were San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, London, Paris and Berlin. The game website provided the calendars with the launch dates in each of these cities, and also up-to-date tracking information of the game copies.
Hundreds of hard core gamers set up camp in places they expected the copies to land in. After all, who would not want to lay their hands on a copy of such a specially launched game? This ad campaign generated a huge buzz in the gaming community, and Mass Effect 3 released to one of the best openings in its time, leading to sales of millions of copies of the game.
Watch Dogs
This is a soon to be launched, much hyped and much awaited product by Ubisoft. The game's setting is about a government refuge who gets falsely implicated in a conspiracy, and loses his wife in the ensuing events. He sets out to take revenge using technology. He uses his mobile phone to hack and access anything over the internet at the swipe of a finger. The player controlling him can take over street cameras, hack into ATMs, unlock cars, turn off the power grid, and just about anything you can think of.
Now, in order to promote this, Ubisoft set up a mobile repair shop on a street corner, and deployed one of their men to run it. When people walk in to get their phones repaired, he goes into the back of the shop, and comes out in a few minutes telling them that he installed a special software for free for them. To give a demo, he touches a button on the phone and the lights in the shop go off. He touches again and the lights come back on. This piques the customer's interest. He then takes them out of the shop, and walks over to a parked car and swipes on the phone again. The car unlocks and the alarms set off. He switches the alarm off using his phone too. He then takes the customer over to an ATM, and by using the phone yet again, the machine starts spewing out cash and people on the footpath rush to collect the notes.
By now, the customer is truly amazed. The man then hands over the phone to them, and directs them to use the software. When the customer touches a button, all the street lights on the road go off. Then he points them to the traffic lights, and when the customer uses the phone, all the lights go green. Cars on the road go berserk, and meet with an accident. The police soon turn up, and the man points to the customer and tells the cops that this person was responsible. The cops come over to the scared customer, take the phone from their hands, and show the screen to them.
The phone reads, "You have just experienced what all you can do in Ubisoft's WatchDogs". The customer is left speechless.
Now, which person in the world, whether a gamer or not, will not buy this game just by knowing that they were a part of it?
I have recently read a news article about these game developers who have gone ahead and put real world people from the streets into the game world. Now if I happened to be in the game, I would love to go buy it!
No comments:
Post a Comment