mattyford.com

I have recently been catching up online on all of the controversy surrounding two recent viral campaigns - the Witchery “Girl in the Jacket” and the Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World”. These have really seemed to polarise both consumers and industry folk alike once they were revealed as “fakes”.

At the negative extreme, both campaigns have been labelled deceitful, misleading, and a new form of Spam attacking us virally on video sites like YouTube (although how 14 year old girls complaining about their lives or cute hamster videos aren’t considered Spam before these I will never understand).

What they fail to realise is the new opportunity for consumers to not only be involved with the brand on a personal level, but to be actively be involved in the story - even if the end result was not what they expected.

What this begins to do is enter the world of Alternate Reality Games (ARG’s). Essentially these are games or narratives played in the real world, with active participants across the globe working together to move the story forward (often solving puzzles to do so).

ARG’s have recently been used to promote brands or products. My favorite example was the ARG created by 42 Entertainment for the band Nine Inch Nails, for the release of their album Year Zero. I won’t go into detail of what was created to promote the album (check out the NINWiki to get the full details), just that it involved everything from coded messages, leaked songs with hidden information, live stunts, and a massive amount of websites ‘discovered’ online. This allowed the fans to actively participate in the album in the real world or online, outside of simply listening to the songs.

So with Witchery and Tourism Queensland, they turned out to be fakes. But consumers got to interact with a narrative, and feel like they were part of a community (either helping a girl in distress, or competing for a great prize against other like minded people). Added on to regular advertising (like print or outdoor ads) and this opens up a whole new and exciting world of audience engagement.