We're very excited that Brandweek picked our AudienceGames work as one of the Best Marketing Ideas in the World! Given that they only selected six to be part of this story, we're pretty darned excited about it! I've highlighted some of the best quotes from article, but what we really loved about this program (and our previous AudienceGames work with SS+K for msnbc.com) was that it's what we do best.
We loved that we really brought their "Life is Better Lived Together" tagline to life by creating a social, group game experience. And our modest research showed that people who played the game enjoyed the overall cinema experience then people who didn't. And it generated 33,000,000 media impressions for Volvo as well. It was a win/win for everyone! Yea, I know it's cliche, but it's true!
So I'll stop writing so you can read what other people had to say about the Volvo program.
Wag the CarGoing to the movies in England isn't really much different than doing it here in America. You buy a ticket and maybe a bucket of popcorn, take your seat and then wait for the previews. But visitors to 12 of London's Cineworld theaters the evening of Oct. 13, 2007, got to do a lot more than watch previews. All 500 audience members, at the same time, got to drive a new Volvo XC70.
"We didn't just want to use the cinema for standard advertising," said Luke Tipping, a planner at MindShare, Volvo's communications firm in the U.K. "We wanted to really shift brand perception and get consumers to think that we're a brand of dynamism and fresh thinking. So, we took cinema beyond spot advertising."
That, they did. Dubbed "Human Joysticks," Volvo's solution was a live, interactive game developed by New York-based Brand Experience Lab in which audience members—with a driver's-seat view of a curving country road on the screen—"steered" the virtual car by waving their arms to the left or right. Motion-sensor technology maneuvered the car by majority rule. By swerving clear of obstacles in the road, the crowd scored points. Since the promo ran in 12 theaters, there was a winning audience. Its members received free movie tickets.
The game was, of course, fun. But "Human Joysticks" had highly specific branding goals. Volvo Cars U.K. was in the midst of an effort to extricate itself from its stuffy image, while also trying to get across the message that the XC70 was a roomy family sedan. The result was the tagline, "Life is Better Lived Together," which the interactive cinema game supported experientially. Not only was the movie theater an obvious social locus, Volvo marketers staged the game at showings of Ratatouille, a film sure to draw many families.
"We wanted to create a game around Volvo cars, but one which the crowd could interact with," said Paul Adrian, business growth director at ad agency Nitro, London. Added Tipping: "It's all very well to have a tagline, but the brand ambition was to become a facility of togetherness."
Which, in the U.K., is apparently easier said than done. "We're a lot more reserved as a nation than you are," Adrian said. "In our culture, [we were afraid that] people would just sit on their hands." Fortunately for Volvo, people didn't, and the press generated by "Human Joysticks" was a marketing coup at least on par with the positive impressions created among theatergoers.
"Human Joysticks" was actually the fruition of an earlier experiment with the same technology, tried out this past summer in America. Here, the audience played an on-screen videogame similar to Pong prior to the screening of Spider-man 3. The crowd's hand motions controlled the movement of a pad off which a ball ricocheted. For Brand Experience Lab CEO Barry Grieff, the results of both installations proved that audience-interactive gaming is a branding vehicle that will see many more marketing applications in the future, irrespective of international borders.
"Our opinion is that the world is moving toward participation," he said. "This is an example of a simple application where [the audience doesn't] need controllers and hardware. It's understood right from the beginning."
Understood, sure, but the big question remains: Amid all the fun it's having, does the audience associate the game with the brand sponsoring it? Grieff's research—conducted by questioning audience members after the conclusion of the films—yielded results worth pondering.
Following "Human Joysticks" in London, a remarkable 71% of moviegoers recalled that the virtual car they'd driven was a Volvo. "And that was two and a half hours after the game was played," Grieff added. The research also revealed the audiences that play interactive games prior to movies tend to like the movies shown after the games better than those who don't, which theoretically expands the marketing potential of this technology beyond a sponsoring brand to include theaters and film companies themselves. "After the games, people were in a better frame of mind," Grieff said. "This worked better than any commercial."
In the near-term, however, Tipping said "Human Joysticks" achieved immediate results for Volvo because it turned what was just a brand into a social entity. "Brands are boring when they're not part of popular culture," he said. "We wanted Volvo to be talked about. And we got plenty of that." —Robert Klara
Link: Best Marketing Ideas in the World.
Link: Brand Experience Lab -- AudienceGames In-Cinema Experience.
