unforum

[bewarethanatos]

Exploring "ARE's" as an alternative marketing strategy?

[konamouse]

Read the "Year Zero" forum.
An ARG that promoted NiN's latest album.

[catherwood]

My initial thoughts might not answer your questions, but maybe help focus your goals. If you want to use the ARE to advertising an ongoing business, should this be an open-ended campaign? Let me think out loud for a bit. A game usually has a beginning, middle, and end, with goals; an "extended reality experience" tied to a franchise (like a tv show, or brand, or business) can be a website that lets people spend time in another reality, and they can come and go at will. Perhaps you could make your company website into a cool place to hang out, which might include hidden areas to explore, puzzles to solve in order to access a discussion forum, for example. Ongoing updates with new content will keep it fresh and get people to revisit and even spread the word -- if you have the resources to maintain it over the long term.

it's early morning here, and i should get to work, but i'll watch the thread for more ideas.

[bewarethanatos]

[FLmutant]

You've got a few studio heads around here too -- and by that I mean the "oh, my head, I work in a recording studio".

I wouldn't worry about the payoff. Make the payoff feel special, it doesn't have to lead to a huge movie. And heck, it could lead to multiple albums worth of content. See if you can connect it to a movement the bands would already be interested in.

During college, our university town passed a noise ordinance and used it primarily to crack down on live music after midnight. At our studio, we turned that into the protest album called "Noise Ordinance" with a track from 16 different bands and shows in 8 college towns. Would have been a great ARE concept now, with a shadowy civic conspiracy to keep the bands down.

And, of course, since you have a studio, you'd be a fool not to think about all the things you could do with that. Recordings of single musicians that served as "puzzles" that required figuring out which gig to go to that night to pick up the next bit of the story comes to mind.

Most of all, have fun. You. While you are doing. That fun is what will end up being infectious.

[bewarethanatos]

[notgordian]

This is possibly completely off-base, but if you want to see the reactions to a more "unexpected" ARE, check out the Ditch Witch game -- according to the advertising company agency it, it was fairly successful.

At least in my view, that campaign proved that as long as you keep in mind the tried and true "know your audience" rule and don't mind spillover into unintended audience bases, it's possible. Success still depends on coming up with a good idea and executing it, but it's possible.