Advergames

I never thought I’d be lucky enough to see the day where legendary Houston Rockets center, Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo fronted an 8-Bit advergame.  Thankfully that dream just came true courtesy of Old Spice and their awesome/weird/awesome ’4 1/2 Weeks To Save The World’ campaign.  Watch below, get excited, play here!

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Honda UK, W+K London and  B-Reel have launched a new HTML5 browser based advergame called ‘The Experiment‘.  The game challenges players to create a series of chain reactions by placing pop-up windows in the right sequence. Different placements trigger various chain reactions, with thousands of permutations possible.  As you progress through the levels new features are revealed hopefully continuing the excitement…but we all know these things can get old quickly!  It kinda reminds me of the old Honda Accord Cogs ad from yesteryear but revamped for 2011!

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Games, mobile and random dominated this week with some excellent new breakthrough work.  If you want to know whats hot and by exemption whats not then look no further than this weeks most popular stories on ADZAG;

1. Dominos Embraces Gamification With ‘Behind The Pizza’ > Making ingredients sexy again! Game based education platform from Dominos.
2. Bring Back A Classic Volkswagen With VW’s Fanwagen > VW’s Fanwagen campaign continues to turn heads in what is a well executed promotion.
3. Protect Your Identity Online With Verisure > Humorous mobile campaign built to raise awareness of your online identity and ensuring its safe and secure from random Facebook photos!
4. ASICS Want To Know If You Can Run Faster Than Advertising > U.S. marathoner Ryan Hall who boasts a 6-foot-10 stride length and 4:46 mile pace, this instillation lets you see if you can keep up!
5. The Power Of Foursquare: 7 Innovations For Business > Foursquares still kicking and so are these 7 innovations for business.

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Seven days, tons of great work and of course one spooky holiday in the middle.  This weeks most read stories on ADZAG range from 2 guys creepy costumes to gesture based racing games and even a world record knitted scarf!  Yup, heaps weird, please enjoy!

1. FIFA ’12 Creates The Worlds Longest Scarf >> Digital participation equals physical reward with your tweet becoming immortalized in the Guinness Book of Records.
2. How To Play Angry Birds On Any Website >> Can’t get enough of those angry little birds? Now you can play the game downloaded half a billion times on any website in the world!
3. Red Bull Racing Game Controlled By Your Face >> Rediculous gaming experience controlled by your facial expressions!
4. Bring Back A Classic Volkswagen With VW’s Fanwagen >> VW turns production over to its fans with one lucky person winning a custom built Volkswagen classic Campervan or Beetle.
5. The Geekiest Halloween Costume Ever! >> Simply the best Halloween costume ever made!

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Red Bull have launched the first facial expression controlled racing game called Red Bull Formula Face.  To be honest I don’t quite know whether to categorise this as genius or loonacy!  Players control their race car by tilting their head from left to right and can earn power-ups and extra points by pulling strange faces and grimacing!  The concept looks awesome and with gesture based gaming firing on all cylinders through platforms like the Wii and XBox Kinect the behaviour is there.  In fact I’m sold, time to go racing!

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It seems the motoring industry has become caught up in the recent tornado of brands employing gamification to drive consumer engagement and participation.  Most recently Dodge attempted a scavenger hunt for what it called “The first real world search engine“, the Dodge Journey.  If you haven’t heard it didn’t quite go as planned with suspected cheating, un-found prizes and probably the worst ‘hype video‘ I have ever had the misfortune of watching!  Now Chevy have popped up with a campaign based around ‘Being up for anything’.  Using the campaigns mobile app participants are encouraged to do things for the first time, take photos and share.  Each time a task is completed players will be awarded with badges (FourSquare stylee) and points.  Other players can vote on the best ‘firsts’ like baking a cake of yourself and then eating…yourself, and the most popular get extra points.  At the end of each month the player with the highest score gets a Chevy Sonic for their troubles!  Certainly beats a scavanger hunt and as a concept could probably stand on its own.

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An interesting campaign that ran earlier this year has just had the obligatory advertising case study put together.  Intel’s ‘The Escape’ campaign broke free of the standard YouTube protocols and created new way for an audience to engage with video content.  Pretty much the entire story was interactive, so much so that the whole concept was more like a game than a video pulling in your Facebook connections, incorporating mobile and offering viewers the ability to control characters actions.  The results achieved were decent, but certainly not mind-blowing but you are able to judge for yourself as the experience is still live at Intel ‘The Escape‘.

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When there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call? Vodafone Germany of course, or that’s what they want you to think with the release of their new augmented reality mobile application called Buffer Busters.  The app transforms your city into a giant video game with the goal to capture virtual monsters with your phone.  When you reach 50 ghosts its time to deposit them safely at one of the containment units conveniently located at Vodafone stores!  Then its off to collect more with the prizes available to the players that capture the most ghosts.

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Wieden & Kennedy Portland and Dodge have launched a clever online/offline cross over campaign to promote the Dodge Journey, a vehicle they are calling a “search engine for the real world”. Three Dodge Journey’s have been hidden around the United States and whoever is able to find each vehicle first keeps it. The campaign is supported by a YouTube Channel which gives players a chance to solve puzzles in return for clues on each cars location. If you are intersted in playing then you better get cracking as the first Journey has already been found!

The “scavanger hunt” for want of a better term is also supported by a national TV execution reinforcing

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In a blink of an eye the week of August 15th has past.  The last 7 days have been led by mobile and gaming innovations, some light hearted and fun and others that tell a much sombre story.  So here’s our round-up of the best of the week incase you missed anything;

• A novel way of raising awareness of drink driving through a drunk valet.
• An augmented reality application that surfaces the hidden dangers on our roads called The Death Revealer.
• Another AR application, this time making Cadbury chocolate bars interactive and playful.
• The WWF delivers another innovative solution to save our planet, the file format that can’t be printed.
• Volkswagen Bluemotion gets a little Casino Royale turning a motorway into a giant roulette wheel.