Digital Stuffing

It looks like the highest ranked product video, the only ranked video, this week is one from Mountain Dew, who have teamed up with Blizzard Entertainment, the guys behind World of Warcraft to promote new flavours of ‘game’ drink – Mountain Dew Game Fuel® Citrus Cherry and Mountain Dew Game Fuel® Wild Fruit. They’re running a promotion, the Mountain Dew game, with lots of gaming prizes. To enter the prize draw, you need to collect tokens by basically going to the site, clicking around, reading the product information, telling your friends, clicking through from ads on other sites, or from social networks. The one thing you don’t have to do is buy the product, it’s all via web interaction.

I’ve finally caught up with the Prototype Experience, a promo for a new console game that has been exciting so many marketers on the blogs. It looks like a great game, one I’ll end up buying (and as usual playing really, really, badly) so it worked for me as a enticement to purchase.

But I was sold on the gameplay description and the trailers, not the actual experiential elements. They’re a little less successful in my case, but I’ve seen they are definitely catching the eye of many.

The experience is a variation on uploading your photos and appearing as part of the trailer/video. The difference here is that you don”t choose which photos to upload but that it grabs them from Facebook. To take part, you have to link your Facebook profile to the game page, using Facebook Connect, a variation on OAuth where you don’t have to give out your password to anyone.

Prototype Login (screenshot from site)

It then runs a trailer for the game, pulling your photos in from the service and interspersing them throughout the action. they also include all your details, the personal information. As I only have 1 image on Facebook, I thought they wouldn’t have much luck but what it does it goes and trawls your connection and brings in their photos as well. You can’t share the video or embed it anywhere as far as I can see, so I think they’re mainly avoiding the copyright and privacy issues that this ‘borrowing’ of images and use of personal details entails, but I was surprised that the system would do this.

After watching the personalised trailer, you get to answer some questions to win a game copy and an XBox360 and then you’re then asked to spread the word, using your choice of network – Facebook or Twitter. This seems to be a requirement of the competition entry, but as I can’t see any terms and conditions, I’m not sure

Prototype Spreadability (screenshot from site)

This is the second campaign I’ve seen this week that has built in the ability to autopost to your status stream, so it’s looking like it’s this quarter’s hot trend. It’s a savvy call to action, although if too many in your network do it, I can see it not quite having the desired impact. Making it compulsary is problematic; the experience should be good enough to get people to want to share it, not making them do it because you don’t trust your stuff is good enough for sharing.

Elsewhere on the site, you can get a story overivew, see some trailers and get some great artworks to download. Most importantly, you can pre-order, but only from specific retailers (Smartoys which is French, fnac, Game Mania, both Belgium.Dutch). So despite being able to see the site in English and it being big in English blogs, you can’t actually by in the UK. The site has been done in Belgium by Sponge and 1MD, so it looks like it is for that market only, although there’s no indication until you’re deep into that it does not apply to you, but again, no T&Cs so I’m not sure if I can enter or not.

Prototype Scene (screenshot from site)

Vodafone have pulled together a lovely little competition to tie in with the Formula One races, calling it the Vodafone Taxi Grand Prix. Vodafone are a sponsor of the Mecedes McLaren team.

• First of all, you need to sign up
• Then, pick your team. You have a choice of 10 drivers across 5 different cities. You need to pick 2 for your team.
• When the race starts, Vodafone track the taxi drivers – using the GPS in their HTC Magic phones. The miles are totalled up. The idea is to complete the race distance in the shortest time. The race distance is that of the target F1 Grand Prix, it was the British one last week, next it’s the German one. Over 5 races, you score points for distance and time, so the person with the highest points wins a trip to the Italian Grand Prix (there’s lots of other prizes too)
• Keep an eye on your drivers. You get lots of statistics about them, so if your driver is not travelling enough, you can swap them around to improve your mileage.
• Come back again and again!

Vodafone Taxi Grand Prix (screenshot from site)

This is a pretty nigty idea. A contest connected with the real world and real people. You get brief bios of the drivers, who are also twittering, so you see what they are getting up to, so over time, you’ll get to know the drivers and what they are like. The mechanic is simple and the interaction allowed keeps you coming back

Britain’s Got Talent is over and the video rankings have far more variety this week. Highest ranked product video is this one demonstrating the new features of XB0x360. Taking a close look at the success of the Wii, they introduce a system where your whole body is a controller. All I can ask is why? Doing some of this stuff I’d end up wrecking the living room (it’s too small). What’s wrong with just lying on the couch The video is in the list a few times, from different accounts.

But the most successful product this week is the Carl Jr Portabello Mushroom Burger, which is running a YouTube campaign. it looks like they are sponsoring a number of prominent video makers to create a video around the product. They’re all good and slightly mad. Given the combined number of views across all these videos, that’s what I call a successful campaign, with a high degree of relevance and reaching out to many different audiences.

Nigahiga has the most watched version.

From smosh

The anti-Carls Jr parody

from WasteTimeChasingCars

The official version – which is no fun at all, far too much ‘serious’ advertising

From Hot for Words

from iJustine

Just a quick post if you’re here after seeing me on my first time on Sky News – thanks so much for taking a look. A quick bio:

• I’ve been blogging about digital media for 3 years, most recently here, but at Behind the Buzz previously
• I’ve also a personal blog that is updated occasionally at Licence to Roam
• I work in digital marketing and social media at twentysixLondon

There’s more on the about page. Thanks again.

Argghhh. There’s Britain’s Got Talent videos everywhere. The final on Saturday was watched by over 18 million people (that’s about 27% of the population, so equivalent to an US audience of about 81million) and it seems they all uploaded videos to YouTube and then watched them. The other key videos seem to be Jonas Brothers and Twilight previews and the odd bit of Champion’s League with Barcelona v Man U, so little else has a chance to get on the list this week.

But the e*trade babies have crept into there, as a trailer for an ABC Money special that was broadcast last Friday. They were big around Superbowl and have made a comeback here.