87 Cool Things

I found the following presentation over on If Only We'd Thought of That and I had to share it. It's a collection of cool things, put together by Google Creative Lab, that are just extremely inspiring and creative. Basically it's fairly comprehensive list of the most recent mashups, location-based games, video annotation, augmented reality, digital light displays, photomosaics and collaborative projects.

If the below SlideShare is too small to view, check out the full presentation on Google Docs.

Levi's 'Go Forth' Fortune

Back in July I wrote about the launch of the Levi's Go Forth campaign. The campaign aimed to reinforce the Levi brand as the original working class hero, the spirit of the original American settler and the revolutionary patriot. The campaign was brought to life through tv, radio and internet. The campaign was developed by Wieden + Kennedy and called on the public to write a new Declaration of the Unites States of American. The tv ad for the campaign featured an original wax recording of Walt Whitman reading his poem “America" overlayed on black and white vignettes. The MP3 of the Whitman's recording is also available for download from the campaign site.

The campaign has had a number of iterations in the last three months and has used a host of iconic themes central to the original campaign spirit to maintain the overall campaign through this extended period. However the question still remained up until just a week ago, where could the campaign go next?

"The question we asked was how do we bring this ['Go Forth'] idea into the real world and bring the brand's unique history into the story and the challenge," said Doug Sweeny, vp of brand marketing at Levi's. "We're trying to get people engaged in the idea of go forth and make it very active."

While the campaign focus to date has very much been around the historic roots of the Levi's brand. However, the modern Levi's customer is very entrenched in a digital world, interacting with everything around them through various digital channels. With this in mind, Levi's needed to draw a clear line between the past and the future. The tool chosen to do this was an Alternative Reality Game that would bring users on a digital treasure hunt through both the real world and the digital worlds that we now occupy.

To fully realise the potential of an ARG and to make the experience as emersive as possible, a narrative was created around a character named Grayson Ozias IV. Grayson has left wax cylinder voice recordings hidden across America, and has challenged the public to find them and, ultimately, a $100,000 fortune that he also buried.

While the game may be considered in many ways to be a 'diet' version in comparison to some of the more elaborate and complex ARGs that have surfaced in recent years, this is more then made up for with the rich and layered content used to drive game play. People participating in the game are asked to solve online puzzles in combination with real-world tasks. All to hunt down clues that will unlock the next part of the game's story. "We're pulling a page out of the ARG books, but we're trying to keep it a little less complicated," said Levi's director of digital marketing Megan O'Connor.

The target audience is Levi's 18 to 24 year old consumers, according to O'Connor. It follows what she calls the "1+9+90 rule" in believing for every full-on participant there will be nine commenters and 90 passive observers, and for that reason, the game's story is accessible to all visitors, not just those playing the game.

Levi's have also made the step of expanding into the Social Media environment by posting some clues through the campaign Facebook page. The Page already has nearly 150,000 fans. In conjunction with this the game also uses Twitter. Plans have also been revealed for other social twists; including the use of live streaming service 12seconds. Perhaps most interestingly, however, will be the introduction of a social responsibility element, when Levi's ask participants to choose a charity that will receive a $100,000 donation.

Levi's is promoting the game via video banner ads on sites including Facebook, Break and Pandora. Publicis Groupe's Razorfish handled digital media planning and buying.

As mentioned above, the Go Forth campaign has seen several iterations over the past three months. This is the third online "excursions" Levi's has planned as part of the "Go Forth" campaign. In "The New Declaration," Levi's challenged people to redefine the Declaration of Independence. Then as the second "excursion" there was a video contest around the concept of "The New Americans." Another three expeditions are planned for the coming months.

All activity associated with the ARG has been done by Wieden + Kennedy. Go live was last Monday (5th October) and the game will run until mid-November.

A Blurred Line Between ARG And Viral Social Media

It all started back in November 2008. Following a 5 year hiatus from the music scene, information started leaking out that Eminem was working on a new album. In and off itself the news attracted some online chatter but nothing was confirmed. However, within a very short space confirmation of the forthcoming album, "The Relapse", began to pop up on various Social Media platforms. Although not in isolation, the most public tool in service was Twitter.

Use of Twitter or other Social Media platforms wasn’t a new move by any means, but the approach most definitely was. Over the course of the following 6 months Aftermath / Interscope Records created a stunningly impactful and captivating campaign. Flitting between Eminem's troubled public past and the new terrifying imaginary world from his latest album, the marketing team dragged fans into an eerie game of hide and seek. Using Twitter, a mix of disturbing thoughts and weblinks were filtered out to the digital community. All of this revolved around a fictional mental institution, Pompsomp Hills, in which the rapper was housed.

Besides the stark and grim mental images tweeted by the star, a number of images were also posted. These included a link to the album's cover, a collage of pills forming Eminem's face; screenshots of an iPhone game set in Pompsomp Hills; and a link to the following trailer for the album’s first single "3 A.M.".



Clearly set in the fictional institution, the video is both disturbing and frightening, as if some sort of demented cross between the Blair Witch Project and a Japanese underground horror. This was the precursor to albums microsite and interactive experience. Both these elements coupled with a “real” looking, amateurish website for Pompsomp Hills brought to life a stunning narrative that almost begged to be real.

Without doubt this was an integrated effort on several key fronts that started a long time before anyone was aware of where it would take them. And although the ‘clues’ were never hard to figure out, and sometimes as simple as a straight forward link, the campaign still stands out as one of note. Fans have been engaged and interacted with on a level that has not only created an exceptional amount of online chatter but ultimately an anticipation that will drive record sales.

Of course this isn't the first time an ARG has been used to promote an album. Most famously, Trent Reznor masterminded (of Nine Inch Nails) the "Year Zero" album release in 2007, that expanded the album's dystopian story line into a full blown audio, visual and mental experience, driven by hidden messages and microsites littered through out anomalously posted images and videos. Unsurprisingly perhaps, recent news has alluded to the concept being turned into a TV show.

Star Trek Alternative Reality Game

I've posted several times about the various ARGs that have been created recently. Unfortunately the Star Trek ARG was not something I participated in, and I really wish I had - it looks like it was incredibly well done. Check out this video run through of how the game played.

What's In The Box? (ARG)

Following my post yesterday I was excited to see an article by Hashem Bajwa on Augmented Reality over on AdAge today. Hashem discusses some recent AR campaigns, including General Electric's Smart Grid technology (also here) and the Topps' 3-D baseball cards system. He also goes into detail on the Mobilizy app that I've previously posted about. All this even further reinforced my belief that ARG or AR apps/games are the way forward.

Low and behold I then received an email asking for my help with a Flash file and an image. Two guys I know were trying to crack an ARG that they had been sent a link to.

Have you seen this:



Do a Google Search for 'what's in the box?' and you'll see a lot of online chatter. Admittedly this video first appeared online about 4 weeks ago but the microsite didn't arrive until a week or so later, and it's only in the last 2 weeks that most of the really interesting stuff has come to light. Most probably this is an ARG for the next Half Life episode (based on the sound effects and audio used). There are also a lot of clues pointing to J.J. Abrams, which immediately brings to mind his 'Magic Box' outlook on storytelling (see his TED presentation).

I really want to go into the details about what I was able to work out so far but what's the fun in that. Go check it out and see if you can get anywhere. But be warned, I quickly discovered that whoever is behind this definitely sees their target audience as being very familiar with Flash, Java, Photoshop, HTML and CSS. Perhaps the modern gamer is far more educated then we were back in my day?

Alternate Reality Interface

A friend was asking me about Trent Reznor's Year Zero on Saturday, and whether I knew of any other big ARG successes and how they worked. Other examples were Audi's 'The Art of the Heist', the Nokia Game (which ran for 6 years), and perhaps the most famous after Year Zero, The Beast. The Nokia Game was the first ARG to use an extremely diverse range of communication channels, with The Beast and Year Zero both pushing those even further. So what next I wondered? What other interfaces could be used for an ARG?

You may not remember the following video, it first appeared doing the rounds in July 2007. It's a promo released by HP to show off their Mscape geolocation platform, which was developed by their labs in Bristol, UK. The video shows “Roku’s Reward” - HP's idea of how game development could utilise the platform. Admittedly you need to over look the terrible stereotypes of who gamers are, but their vision was certainly ground breaking for the time.



The most interesting thing isn't necessarily the video itself or the vision that HP had. HP were in many ways right on the ball. The most interesting thing was the online reaction to the video. Virtually everyone agreed that the concept was fantastic, and that the platform had a lot of potential. However, they also all agreed that HP's prediction was crazy that the technology for this type of game play would be available on hand-held mobile devices within two years. Of course we can now all agree that this technology was very much only two years away (demonstrated recently by the Mobilizy landscape system and Dutch Bank ING's ATM finder).

So why haven't we seen more games/apps appearing that utilise the Mscape platform (or similar). Why has no one looked to use this type of platform for an ARG style marketing campaign? There are a huge amount of GPS enabled hand-held devices now on the market, and for those that aren't surely there is a cell-tower based alternative?

There is a limitation with the platform in that it needs to be based on a specific real-world location, or ‘anchored’ in Mscape’s terminology, but there are many large cities around the world that could sustain a user base within their population that would make it commercially viable. In fact if you think about it there are many cities that would have a transient tourist population that could benefit from some sort of GPS-based interactive system like this; museums, galleries, theme parks etc.

In my opinion, this is where we will see the next 'big thing'. The newest Nintendo DS is already equipped with a camera; a GPS unit could easily be added as a component or built-in to the next gen. The Sony PSP is in the same boat (with a camera and GPS unit already available). So who's going to do it? I wager it'll be Japanese and it will sit on one of these platforms, with customised versions for a dozen or so of the largest cities in the world (mostly US with Toyko, London, Paris and Berlin).

The best selling MP3 album of 2008 was FREE

Trent Reznor is a God when it comes to doing what others don’t understand, pass-off as crazy, and then later praise to the heavens. Year Zero was without a doubt one of the most ambitious, cross-channel, engaging, interactive marketing concepts ever. User participation reached staggering levels and it’s difficult to see how it can ever be topped.

Well Reznor has done it again. Last year Nine Inch Nails’ released Ghosts I-IV, an album that they put out for free under a Creative Commons license. As it turns out, Ghosts I-IV went on to become the best-selling MP3 album on Amazon in 2008.

With sales of more than $1.6 million in its first week, a #1 slot on the Billboard charts, and becoming the Last.fm 4th most listened to album of the year, Ghosts I-IV has done it all.

The Creative Commons blog notes:

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.