Ghana is the heart of Cadbury Dairy Milks Fairtrade Cocoa and so the track celebrates all things Ghanaian: its people, its rappers, its dancers, its cultural figures and, of course, its cocoa beans.

I love this. Just completely takes the piss out of most other beer ads! It’s doing a conventional ad in a way that makes you want to watch it. You know what’s going to happen but you want to know what they will say about it. Via Ben

Doritos iD3 (screenshot from site)

The Plot

Set in the near future, it’s all about identify theft. You’ve been ‘recruited’ as a mole for the Serious Fraud Squad and have to try and get access to the boss. It’s in 3 chapters being released over the next few weeks, so you have to wait and remember to come back for the next episode.

The Interaction and Gameplay

It’s all shot in the first person, so you are the hero in this story. You get to upload your image which appears in various places, id cards etc throughout the story. There’s a further level of connection if you decide to use Facebook as your login, where it will pull information from your profile and insert into the narrative. I;ve tried this before with Prototype Experience (blog post and it added little given my paucity of information).

However, I was underwhelmed by the gameplay. There are a number of points where you have to make a choice to drive the plot, go one way or the other, but most of the time I’m just watching a film. Maybe I just chose the ones that had the straightest path through the story, but I did not feel I added a lot. I wasn’t doing anything, just watching with the occasional click. I though there was no personal involvement. I’m hoping this will get better and they’ll be asking more of me. They’ve had to balance accessibility and ease of play and it looks like they’ve chosen the easiest route – no puzzles, little thinking required, just sit back and watch.

To play the game, you have to have bought a bag of Doritos and enter the code from the bag. There’s obviously peril involved, as you are given 6 lives per Dorito code; to get more lives you have to buy more snacks. That’s the better deal than the ones where you have to enter a code from every single time you enter; at least you get the chance to survive throughout and win a variety of prizes.

The Competition

It’s complicated. The main contest seems to need you to guess the name of a mystery flavour, an option that is provided right up front, so it appears to be a wild guess with no clues. If you do, you get the chance to win £20k. Everyone who does enter gets added into a separate draw. Then there are prizes awarded whilst playing the game, which are just awarded randomly. Doritos have partnered with O2 for some of these prizes. There’s a final contest for those who complete the 3 episodes, where a draw picks someone who then gets to pick a mystery envelope form a range containing various amounts of money.

The Branding and Production

Absolutely superb. The site is high quality, the story line is good, the filming looks excellent. The Doritos brand is embedded throughout the story, from subtle touches of having bags of the crisps being eaten by characters. The bags – and the competition – are a key plot story so it’s completely integrated. I’m slightly surprised that they allowed the brand to be so integral in a story about illegal activities (based on some recent experience) but feel that’s the only way to get it into the story without it feeling shoe-horned in, so well done that brand manager.

The Pitch

An lovely email (from someone I know) which has obviously gone through the marketing review given some of the slightly over the top hyperbole presented. The best touch though is that the team involved has obviously thought about digital outreach from the start. I’m provided with a PR code to play the game; on entering I’m told I’m not eligible for prizes. It’s been coded in from the start, which is impressive.

Summary

A high-production value movie, with interesting touches and a strongly integrated brand. overall, I liking it a lot.

That’s the only one in the weekly charts, but coming on strong today is this one for Captain Morgan, a lovely little chat up line; it does not appear to be an official upload, but it’s still pulling in the views. Right on brand message.

Pizza Hut Twintern (screenshot from site)

Go to the front page of Pizza Hut and you’ll see this advertisement – they’re looking for a Twintern, someone who is being paid to Twitter for them. I’m pretty sure this is the first time a temp job has been advertised on the front page of Pizza Hut, but this is not just an job ad* it’s a marketing tactic in its own right.

The job itself if pretty straightforward. Attend relevant events and twitter about them. Monitor the service and other social media outlets and report on the activity and sentiment. Plenty of agencies offer this service and enough companies are using it. However, the clever thing is turning the ad into a PR-able event. How many other low-paid short term internships make the New York Times

The Twintern must also play social-media defense, monitoring Twitter for any mentions of the brand and alerting superiors whenever anything negative about the Hut is being said. (Applicants should study last week’s YouTube gross-out video posted by Domino’s employees, which was quickly passed around Twitter, to understand why.) The successful applicant will speak fluent OMG and LOL and correctly use the terms DM (direct message), RT (retweet) and # (hashtag).

The job ad is a little more restrained. They’re taking it far more seriously:

Candidates should be a junior or senior studying for a B.A. or B.S., preferably with specialization in marketing, journalism, communications, public relations or a related course study. Demonstrated knowledge of social media is a must. Selected applicants will be required to submit a portfolio of social media know-how.

They’ve tapped into the social media theme, the Twitter zeitgeist, the Domino’s pizza incident and wrapped it all up into a package that interests reporters. Brilliant PR. So far, so good. But the proof is in the pudding as they say – how are they going to be using this person and what is the long term role of social media within the company?

*it’s an M&S ad job! (Sorry but the Marks and Spencers slogan does stick in the head)

Here’s another one from the phone division for their new I8910 HD phone, a camera trick. I’ll have to admit, if I hadn’t been in a discussion with someone recently about something very similar it would have taken me time to guess what the trick was. What do you think it is?

They’re going to release a ‘making of’ video in a few weeks, explaining it. Meantime, join in the conjecture about how they did this.

Highest ranked product video is this one from Patrick Doyle, President of Domino’s USA doing damage control after a video was uploaded of two employees adulterating pizzas. They’ve also launched a Domino’s Twitter feed which seems to be doing a good job of being conversational

Another fast food brand and another controversy, this time Burger King upsetting Mexico with its ad for the Texican Burger. Apparetnly, it’s because they are using the flag incorrectly; they’re replacing the campaign, used in Spain and the UK, as soon as is ‘commercially possible’.

Finally, the Microsoft PC ads are currently making enough of a stir to have a parody made, always the sign of an ad that has hit home one way or another. Here’s Homeless Frank trying to find himself a laptop for under $1000, from Landline TV

A very simple site, with just the video and a form to add your name and question, it seemed to work quite well.

Cadbury's Webcast (screenshot from site)

TurboTax has Tay Zonday, of Chocolate Rain fame, pimping out the brand’s Super Status competition as well as his latest song

Nordstrom, a new name to me for online videos, have this one about boyfriend jeans. This video is not your usual type to be highly viewed, so I’m guessing there was an ad buy to promote it.

The Blackberry Bullet is the hero of this ad, taking on Apple, or rather an apple. This is a repost, not from the original brand

In essence, the Skittles site is now (mainly) a frame that pulls in other sites on the web. In what is their most risky move, the home page is a Twitter search. As well as pulling up people’s comments about the new site, it is also being ruthlessly gamed. I’m not sure how long this will last; they’ve obviously thought about this as you go through an age check before you hit the site, I assume to ensure you are old enough to be there is there is going to be swearing etc, UPDATE: two days later, they’re now using Facebook as the homepage, with Twitter relegated back to chatter alone. I suspected they’d do something like that

Skittles on You Tube (screenshot from site)

Skittles on Flickr (screenshot from site)

The rest of the site is more controllable. It shows the Skittle profiles on YouTube and Flickr for their images and videos. They also have a Facebook page for their ‘friends’, where you can join the group. This also has a nice little mixing game, to create a song for your favourite Skittles.

They only seem to have 2 pages which are on the Skittle site – the overall product page with nutritional information (the other product pages are Wikipedia ones) and the contact us page.

What do I think?

It makes a change for an agency (in this case agency.com) to borrow from another agency site instead of from YouTube or Facebook. They’ve done a nice job of the site, as well as what I’m guessing was a very interesting internal discussion with their client, who has to be congratulated for making such a bold step for a consumer brand.

In most places, the idea works; the videos, images and Facebook links are the most useful for a brand. I’m not 100% convinced it works for the products, as the Wikipedia page does not really give much information out about the product (and will now be subject to vandelism). The home page is the most interesting choice. At the moment, with the novelty, Skittles is trending number one for mentions, the word is being gamed and all sorts of stuff is up there. I’d love to understand the normal level of Twitter mentions – is it actually regular enough to justify having the page as your home page? Or, as I think they will, once the immediate buzz has died down they’ll leave the Twitter on the Chatter page and put something else up on the home page?

I like this. As a campaign idea to raise the profile of the brand it is currently working superbly and as a long term idea it has legs. The brand can focus it’s efforts on building portable content and easily feed into the main site, something I think could be a far more effective way to use brand marketing budget. Hopefully the brand will hold tight over the first few days until it settles down and then start really working it.