really nice facebook hijack

How much information do you give away?

Games site GameSpot gives a guide to ARG’s from Advertising to artforms.

participatory advertising and ARG.

Social Creature is the work of Jenka Gurfinkel – digital strategist, experience designer and self professed culture creator. This is an interesting reflection on 12 months in transmedia

Everything is everything

A huge ugly bag of greatness for creating transmedia.

Transmedia tools

And more from the ready-think-do-tank here

On June 10th 2005, a tiny indie team headed by a bloke called Christopher Nolan released a small film – Batman Begins. No one really heard or cared about it at the time, and it is still very unlikely you will ever meet anyone who has seen it.

I’m told it was a rip-off of the epic phenomenon ‘Condorman’ – superstar action vehicle for Hollywood hunk Michael Crawford – but I cannot see it coming close to the scope or scale of that Disney cash-cow.

There was surprisingly a sequel to this ‘Batman’ (just ridiculous – a bat man? – bat’s are no where near as cool as condors), but that also disappeared without trace. The impossible has happened, and this unknown director with his niche product has secured a third release. Cynical attempts to generate publicity have seen Hollywood drama heavyweights such as Uwe Bol attached, but it is clear this will again be helmed by the unknown and unproved Nolan.

Obviously desperate for attention, they squirreled together a few quid and realised the internet was cheap, so spent it on a twitter crack promotional piece, which rewarded the audience with a sneak peek of a film no one has heard of, and probably never will. If I know films – and I think I do - I predict it will again disappear without trace.

There are accusations of nepotism, due to Nolan’s famous Irish singing sisters, who have apparently ruled tinseltown since their 1979 single ‘I’m in the mood for dancing’ shook the world starting the global dynasty we know today.

This season I am mostly trending rubber and bad lighting

Warner Bros. are pretty much ahead of the crowd in participatory advertising and Sherlock Holmes was a great example of this. Here is the trailer for the online game of the 2009 movie. Given the subject matter, it’s not a huge leap of logic to see that this fits perfectly, but it is still a bold move even now. There are more sophisticated examples out there, but this is slick.

The Game is Afoot!!!!!
 

Liquid Paper as we called it way back in the 1980′s. Up there with marker pens as the mind altering substance of choice for the ‘hardo’s’ of British secondary schools. Tippex throws some money at an ancient art and hopes our collective memories have been rotted away by sniffing their products. This may have been done many times before, but its still a good solid example of the art of YouTube page hijacking.

Buy mind altering corrective fluid kids, and we'll kill a real bear!

All the way back in 2006 when the internet was still in black and white and under the control of malicious squirrels operating from deep within the Thames Barrier,  innovators of interactive advertising – Glu London – created this fantastic piece of promotion for Mini – that great British brand owned by Germany.

At once both incredibly simple and exceptionally sophisticated, this is the advertising tool that launched a thousand startups and made AdMan shout ‘That’s briliiant!!!! – copy it immediately without understand why it works or what it does for everything from cheese to deoderant!’

Glu are responsible in large part for AdMen across the world asking ‘can’t you just take my TV ad and make it a viral?’ as if virality and the desire to pass on a piece of advertising is a plugin for JoePublic 2.0.

As you can tell, I have been asked this a few times. By idiots.

Mini Cooper – ‘Ave a Word

It’s festival season so I thought it might be nice to bring this wonderful advert for Googly Chrome and HTML5 up.

The Arcade Fire are altogether wonderful muso’s and I find their music like being trapped in the lift of a department store made entirely from reclaimed driftwood and glitter. Which is why I find it a bit strange that they chose to promote their single in association with the unofficial owners of the internet – but somehow it makes sense and both parties come out of it relatively untarnished. There’s even a bit of Craig Reynolds ‘Boids’ thrown in there for us AI nerds. I like flocking. A lot.

Anyway – if you haven’t tried it yet, simply put the postcode of your more youthful self and prepare to be punched in the face with nostalgia. If by nostalgia – I mean googlemaps dressed up as a music video.

When you say it like that it sounds truly horrible – but its much nicer than I describe. Google are the Andrew Ridgely to Arcade Fire’s George Michael.

Arcade fire – Wilderness Downtown

Ubisoft you creator of interesting interactive content you! I loved Far Cry 2, but you really shouldn’t have let Clint Hocking get away, he is a lovely man and a crusader of evolutionary narrative. Now he’s shacked up with LucasArts. Don’t pretend you don’t care. Don’t pretend that beneath your aloof sophisticated Frenchness, you aren’t hurt a little bit. I know I am. You should have fought for him – you could have kicked George Lucas’ ass.

Anyway as a brief review of your output since inception, the Splinter Cell’s were great thanks to Clint, ditto Far Cry 2, Beyond good and Evil was smashing, Prince of Persia was excellent – OK everything you do is pretty bloody good and you are the only thing keeping EA from franchising ‘my weekly shopping 2011′ – but letting Clint go? I know he looks a bit like Dan Houser depending on what state of hairyness you catch them in – but he’s beautiful on the inside. Can’t you two make up?

The greatest thing in your catalogue by far is of course Vacation Sports on the Wii, and I highly suggest you immediately set the lead external designer and producer on that particular masterpiece on to Far Cry 3 where I would follow in Clint’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ footsteps and base the whole thing on another literary masterpiece. Maybe a book or something.

Anyway – one thing you did that wasn’t fun was Prototype. It started off great but where was the testing? The difficulty curve is all over the shop – its one of only 3 games I’ve ever given up on – the other 2 were Jet Set Willy and Merceneries 2. Do you want to be part of that trio? DO YOU????

Anyway – your marketing campaign was significantly better and this early facebook hijack was quite nice, and didn’t pretend to be any thing other than a cold marketing proposal and for that I salute you.

it knows everything.....