Here’s a video of a guy who hired dancers (either 50, or 50 couples, depending on your source) to help him propose in Washington Park (via Gothamist)

But he’s not the first. Here’s one from earlier in the week, in Chicago. (via Chicago Convergence)

Any more out there? Of course, the cynic in me is now wondering which brand is behind these

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.

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.

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

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.

• 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!

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

In the past, the Army have delivered some really smart campaigns that take you from the TV ad (or other offline channel) back to the website where they can immerse you in the story and get you spending a lot more time with their content in an effort to sign you up.

Their latest campaign, Smart Thinking Soldier, does exactly that again. The TV ads leave you with a scenario for you to choose what to do next. Online, the story continues with some smart gameplay in tagging IEDs and navigating tunnels. But that’s as far as I got. In a similar way to Lucy, writing in The Guardian, I’m defeated by technology. A combination of too heavy content that freezes my machine on occasion, a very fluid mouse interaction that leaves me sea-sick when I’m hunting around a room for IED elements and a navigation system that leaves me not being able to direct my player round a maze.

The site looks good, has great content, brilliant interactive elements, downloads a lot of information for you but leaves me wanting more – wanting to actually play it! I’m wondering if they would have been better off making the whole thing a downloadable app?

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

The Go Mini Man Go site is at heart a blog and they’re regularly updating it with lots of Lego news. I quite like the timeline as well, where you can see 100′s of Mini Men

Load up your face, adjust the parameters and the make-up company adds the latest looks to your face, all made with their products. You can pick your favourite and send it along to your friends – which sends them a code to add a free lipstick or mascara to a purchase (WINKORKISS)

They’ve got a busy Sephora Facebook page as well, which has over 48k members and seem to regularly put up offers and contests, as well as being active in the group there.

First you have the opportunity to Be Claus (I’m guessing it was called Claus Yourself at some point), loading up your picture and putting on the beard, hat and Christmassy jingle – then embed the lot. (I’d embed, but it seems not to work on here)

There’s a Post Office, where you can download letter-headed paper to write your letter to Clause to make sure he know what you want this year. For each letter received, they are going to donate $to the Make-a-wish foundation (up to $1million)

Then you have the story of Virginia’s letter, an epistle from an 8 year old girl in 1897 who wrote to the New York Sun as she trusted the press enough to tell her the truth about whether Santa Claus existed. The Sun answered, bu not directly, doing its best to keep her hopeful whilst not telling an outright lie!

They’ve also got a pretty good supporting download site, where you can grab a lot of content for your blog post, like the letter to the Sun, banner ads, or this commercial

Click to play

I like the whole package here, there’s a lot of stuff and a lot of assets to grab and in effect advertise Macy’s. But there seems to be little in it for the average blogger, little incentive except the Be Claus tool. Why should I put banner ads on my site – do I get a revenue share? Not quite, but if I’m on the list of bloggers identified by the outreach team (You Cast Corp, the Social Media company that is doing the connections and hosting the assets) I could get a $20 dollar gift voucher, according to the email posted by Dave at Intuitive Life. Dave praises the email sent, as at least there’s been some thought into the email, some personalisation. I agree, there’s a good balance here between form letter and personalisation, a good balance of effort and efficiency.

The main site is pretty basic. It has episode listings, character (and actor) bios and clips. The main focus of creativity has obviously gone on the game/interactive element.

The quality of the application is really nice, superb images, flash that flows extremely well, everything feeling really shiny. But once you get beyond the surface, the cracks begin to show. In effect, you have 2 main components. The first is a ‘which character am I’. These are very common, going round and round the blogs, multi-choice quizzes to inform you which superhero or character from your favourite show you are. Here they’ve glossed it up, in a cool flash interface, with sound clips and great images but at it’s heart it’s still that multi-choice quiz. Unfortunately, it’s a quiz with a dodgy algorithm as this morning, everyone in the UK was Abby. Not sure if that’s what they expected, especially as my completely non-scientific review of tweets makes me think she’s one of the least sympathetic characters. I always though the idea of these quizzes was to get some difference!

The other part of the experience is the commenting – as you answer the questions, you get asked why you think that and invited to place a comment. They’re then mapped up, so you can see an sampling as you explore. But there’s nothing else there, there’s no way to connect with other people, to explore the option. This could have been a far richer source of commentary; I think they missed out an opportunity for people to think about what they would do and explore options. Everyone thinks they’d survive, even if very few do. We’re overdue a pandemic anyway and knowing what could happen is useful or even just exploring behaviour in a more localised disaster. The Red Cross do this well, I’ve even seen the BBC do it well in their interactive piece for Spooks Code 9.

Overall I’m disappointed with this; first impressions were great and then I was left wanting more, so much more. I’m guessing this was commissioned late in the development, especially as it was not ready for the Sunday first episode, as it’s very superficial, put on top of the show and not part of it from the beginning. I think there could have been more value in the supporting online experience if they’d gone more basic – forego the flash and spend the money on a debate and moderation!