......Yeah I know
Don’t be fooled! This picture of me and my cat Beckett is not actually being displayed on a billboard in Times Square (I hope), it is simply a screenshot from a custom-made movie courtesy of Cosmopolitan’s new FUN FEARLESS FEMALE Campaign website. By connecting to my facebook, the website was able to access my profile picture and then create a video that featured pictures of me and my friends as the faces of the new campaign.At the beginning of the semester, Professor Deseriis posted an article titled The Future of Ad Agencies and Social Media. It discusses the ways in which advertisers are now required to keep up with social media and the like in order to reach markets and maintain visibilities.
Early on in the article, O’dell notes:
“…Keeping up with change is never good enough in this industry; the most successful, game-changing campaigns are generally a bit ahead of the curve. It’s not enough to hitch your star to an existing facet of viral content; you have to create the content yourself. And you can’t wait for mass markets to catch up to new technologies before you begin thinking about how to incorporate new tech into campaigns and creative; you need to test how that tech will work now. Mobile and social ads are no longer new; what’s more interesting now is figuring out how brands can integrate creatively and effectively with location apps and casual games.”
Overall, it would seem that Cosmopolitan Magazine is attempting to act out this assertion, combining the illusion of interactive advertising with a personalized element to create an experience that is both dependent on and communicated through social media. More on my being a FUN FEARLESS FEMALE later. As stated in my travelogue proposal, I would like to focus on interactive advertising. However, as Professor Deseriis pointed out, this is a blanket term that can be further broken down into several categories. Thus, I would like to examine three different areas within this idea separately
- Online advertisements that are merely interactive, and require the viewer’s participation to come to completion
- Online ad campaigns that have social networking components that seek to utilize this new media for its spread, and lastly
- A brief look at advergaming
here we go!
INTERACTIVE ADS
Haaaay girl
The focus of my travelogue proposal was the Perrier Mansion advertisement featuring Dita Von Teese (link to her Wiki page incase you live in a world with out pasties). The ‘mansion’ is online experience created by Nestle to promote its sparkling water brand. Paying the Dita a visit takes under ten minutes and involves being led through it’s halls by the fair-skinned seductress, who addresses the viewer directly the entire time, and completing a series of interactive games. The games are not competitive and have no real objective — and at the end the whole thing proves to be nothing more than an aesthetic smorgasbord of an advertisement, an experience for experience’s sake. Moreover, though she was putting on a show, Dita didn’t seem to be working up much of a sweat–and thus didn’t seem to be in too much of a need of any sort of refreshment. What I am saying is that the advertisement was more an exercise in creating a supersexy brand identity than in actually advertising the product.
These days, examples of interactive advertisement abound. They run the gamut from the fully-immersive (if ultimately frivolous) experience as seen in the Dita ad, to far simpler, only slightly interactive numbers like this one on the Wrangler Europe website. It’s presented in a slide-show format, and the only thing the viewer/user must do is to drag his or her mouse in the indicated direction when prompted, which moves the model forward or backward (and his clothes alternatively off and on) depending on the direction of the motion. As with the Dita advert, this ad is not a game with a specific objective, instead it is a display for display’s sake that involves engages the viewer on an aesthetic level (stopping the guy mid-fall and going back and forth as fast or slow as you please is pretty cool), thus encouraging viewers to ‘play along’ with the presented scenario, in doing so allow them to voluntarily prolong the advertising message.
There are many other examples of interactive advertisements that exist entirely in a new-media realm, such as the Lynx Lodge (which I don’t even really understand).
Though most ads such as these offer users the chance to ‘share’ the advertisement on facebook, none of them require a specifically
Who cares????
social element to run properly. This got me wondering, then, how these advertisements as a destination on the internet are themselves advertised? Perhaps the website urls are featured on print ads? It seemed unrealistic for advertisers to expect someone to remember a url long enough to head home and enter it into his browser. The only conclusion I can come to is that advertisements like these rely on word of mouth, online and offline for their spread–and I would propose that the nature of this word of mouth mirrors that seen surrounding other internet phenomena like viral videos or chatroulette. These things, as far as I can tell, are generally spread through several different means, including: literal, person-to-person word of mouth; emails; social networking; and lastly blogging. In spite of the fact that blogs have the potential to reach much larger groups of people, I would say that they are more or less the digital equivalent of word of mouth. (For example, I found out about the Dita/Perrier advertisement through a branding blog called Brand Channel). By making the advertisement itself a spectacle, aesthetified and worth sharing, the advertisers are hoping to piggyback on social interactions within new media. As such, they are truly a product of the age–created in the realm of new media and reliant upon it for their dispersal.
ADS & SOCIAL NETWORKING
A recent Times article on Cosmopolitan’s new online endeavors notes:
“The main focus of the campaign — which will be introduced in New York on Thursday on a billboard in Times Square and at a reception for advertisers, media buyers and press — is a video that simulates a photo shoot for a new Cosmopolitan ad campaign…
It is Cosmopolitan’s hope that viewers will share the video with their friends and spread the message that it has a truly global reach and is at the forefront of the social media game.”
From this fun fearless male’s first hand perspective, here is how things at the FUN FEARLESS FEMALE campaign went down:
- Since I know the thing connects to your facebook, I decide change my profile image. Spend 45 minutes taking photobooth pictures with Beckett.
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- Go to the FFF website, where I am prompted to connect to my facebook.
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Success! Sure glad I changed that profile picture
- I am asked which of my friends are FUN FEARLESS FEMALES. Though FFF has been polite enough to ignore the fact that I am not a female, it only displays images of my female friends. I am required to choose five of these babes to ‘share’ this program with.
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Sorry, Marion
- I am shown a full-window video, where actors address the camera (me!) directly.
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- Ta-dah! I am led past some hard-working fashion types to a board where my image is displayed, I am told that I embody everything they want for the campaign. And, what do you know, a few images of my friends show up there too! But not as big as mine!
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- I am shown a montage of my face as the advertisement around town.
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- Lastly, I am encouraged to ‘share’ this ad with my friends via my facebook.
- Did it!
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- Now, my personalized campaign video is up for all the world to see…… and comment on.
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This last step, I gather, the sharing and commenting part, is where I imagine the folks at Cosmo are hoping the campaign will take off. Even though I actually prompted Maggie to ‘like’ my posting on facebook, I did not ask Alexander. Ta-dah! — there’s one more person who’s been alerted to the campaign. Plus, I imagine that the average user of the FFF will have a network of facebook friends as limited, aloof and crotchety as mine, so the potential for sharing and commenting is actually far greater than my example demonstrates. (I appreciate Alex’s playful sense of irony …. or mocking …. nonetheless). Anyway, this is an example of an online advertisement that requires its viewer to have a facebook account that they are willing to turn over. In order to complete the thing, you must both send off ‘at least five’ invitations to your exclusively FFF friends, and must also use facebook as a platform to display your finished product.
There are many other examples of advertisements like these — Caron posted on my travelogue about the Shark Week Frenzied Waters campaign, which connects to your facebook and uses your personal information and images to cook up an individualized advertisement ripe for sharing. (I should note — the Frenzied Waters facebook connection didn’t work on any of hte three different computers I tried it on, but I’m taking Caron’s word for it anyway).
ADVERGAMING
The last example of new media interactive advertisements that I would like to touch upon is Advergaming. The wikipedia page on Advergaming defines it as “the practice of using video games to advertise a product, organization or viewpoint.” The article differentiates between three types of advergaming:
- Above the line advergaming — wherein a game is created specifically
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for the advertising of a product. - Below the line advergaming — wherein games are created seemingly without any outward advertising intent, and contain material within it that acts as advertising. Like billboards featuring real products in sports games, etc.
- Through the line advergaming — which are more complex and “involve the use of URL hyperlinks within the game designed to induce the player to visit a webpage which then contains below the line advertisements.”
An example of below the line advertising within this above the line advertisement. Ads like this are all over in the game.
From my understanding, advergaming can exist on and offline. My exploration of the topic prompted me to download a decade-and-a-half old copy of Chex Quest, a computer game that was initially distributed through CD roms included inside of cereal boxes. The game’s wikipedia page describes it as such:
“Set on a distant planet named Bazoik, the game follows the Chex Warrior, a humanoid in an anthropomorphic piece of Chex cereal armor, as he fights to eradicate the Flemoid invasion. These slimy, green creatures have infested the planet and captured many helpless citizens whom the Chex Warrior must save. His only weapon is a device called a “zorcher”, which teleports his enemies instead of killing them.”
Powerups include: bowls of fruit, glasses of water, vegetables -- but nothing gives you quite the boost of a POWER BREAKFAST .... or CHEXOR armor suit
Basically, Chex Quest was a kid-friendly “port” of the popular computer game, DOOM, with different weapons and enemies. It played exactly like its predecessor, except instead of health-kits and body armor you find yourself picking up bowls of fruits, vegetables and, of course, Chex cereal for power ups. Also the legions of hell have been replaced by nasal excrement. Chex Quest was popular enough to spawn two sequels, and won several advertising awards.
So, there you have it — my travelogue concerning the various forms of interactive advertisements, as well as my experiences with each. Overall, it would seem that these three categories each represent three distinct approaches to advertising: interactive as a super-enhanced
print or banner ad; social networking ads as ones that piggyback on already existing social connections; and advergaming as a
productcreated to
promote a product. Each maneuver within the new media environment in different ways — though it is clear that all attempt to harness the ideas pointed out in O’dell’s article.
BY KENGO TSUTSUMI
(Also, if you want to download the software to play Chex Quest, it’s here. It’s really fun.)
(Also, if you want to watch me being a FUN FEARLESS FEMALE, don’t)
