Marketing firm Ignited Minds has created an addictive online game to promote Sony Pictures' upcoming movie The Cave. Using a game as a promotional tool has certainly been done before, but Enter the Cave is one of the more unique advergames we've come across. Ignited put its past experiences with Namco, Nintendo and others to good use.
Advergames are hardly a new concept. The thousands of Genesis or SNES Cool Spot cart owners can vouch for the long history of marrying interactive entertainment and product marketing. Simple flash games based around a product have become a staple of even the most unlikely of product homepages, increasing awareness of deodorant, candy, and everything in between. Marketing firm Ignited Minds believes they have the formula for creating effective interactive marketing, and if the website they created for Sony Picture's film The Cave is any indication, then Ad Watch agrees.
GameDAILY BIZ spoke with IM's Justin Prough, Associate Creative Director, Online, Margie Johnson, Director of Interactive Production and Paul Small, Manager, Business Development to see where the idea for Enter the Cave came from.
A Simple Perspective
Ignited Minds' website prominently displays the philosophy that has helped them create such quality pieces of interactive advertising as Enter the Cave, while avoiding the typical flash games: "It isn't interactive advertising until someone decides to click on it. Find ways to encourage people to do just that. Then make it worth their while. It's really not that complicated."
"[Enter the Cave] shows a production value and a level of depth that should cause all makers of interactive marketing to sit up and pay attention."
All right, things are a little more complicated than that. The company is able to display such a simple method of creating compelling advertising because the method focuses on the uniqueness of the initial idea, and that's something that can't be faked. Ignited Minds isn't trying to get people to pay attention to and play with the interactive ads they create by making them shocking, or titillating. They do it by presenting the viewer with something unique, that makes them want to interact with it.
Their steam-covered Nintendo DS banner ad that ran on this and many other video game related sites gave web browsers a unique reason to mouse-over the ad itself. Their World of Warcraft and KOTOR II banners featured other unique methods of encouraging reader interaction without resorting to sound or strobe-style flashing.
Enter the Cave
A compelling, interactive banner ad is certainly a valuable aspect of most of today's well-rounded campaigns, but increasingly video game and film studios are using the web to take that interactivity one step farther. Ignited Minds has worked with such publishers as Namco, Activision, and Nintendo to help build various game-specific homepages with varying levels of interactivity, but the company's crowning achievement is the web game Enter the Cave.
According to IM it is "a web game to end all web games." Whether that's the case or not, the experience does show a production value and a level of depth that should cause all makers of interactive marketing to sit up and pay attention.
"[Enter the Cave] is a massive undertaking that drew on the resources of the entire IM Interactive team, with collaboration from IM Motion+Sound... The site is an ambitious mingling of disciplines: extensive Flash development and art design, 3D rendering, GUI design, even green screen videography," Ignited Minds' Paul Small said.
"Sony initially knew they wanted a game component for The Cave's web site. In early brainstorming meetings the creative team threw around a number of ideas -- twitch game, rappelling game, underwater game, and technologies (director/shockwave/flash) -- none of which stuck until someone asked 'What if the entire site is a game?' Something completely immersive, without traditional navigation, that forces the user to rely on his wits and his gaming acumen to escape alive and in that way, mimics the tone of the movie itself. That idea resonated with both the client and our creative team and away we went," explained Prough, Johnson and Small.
Getting in contact with the brand
Gameplay unfolds in a couple of ways. Half the adventure plays out in a manner reminiscent of LucasArts' old point-and-click adventure games, with gamers collecting items and interacting with their environment with their mouse, in an attempt to escape from the cave. The other half of the experience is derived from a more action-oriented side-scrolling element.
The end result is a website that many users are spending upwards of 20 minutes with. Site cookies allow progress to be saved and resumed at a later date.
"With Enter the Cave we were looking less to innovate and more to take an existing technology and find unusual and organic ways to use it in advancing a storyline that would capture a user's attention and give him an experience worth spending multiple site sessions at up to 20 minutes a time. And ultimately, that is what advertisers are paying attention to - creative ways to provide a skeptical and jaded consumer with content that will bring him in contact with their brand, time and time again," the trio explained.
They continued, "We knew going in that the primary audience for the film was young men, 16-25 -- a demographic known for spending a great deal of time online and being web savvy. They are also known for being uninterested in traditional marketing messages, preferring to discover a brand or product on their own rather than having a marketer force a canned message down their throats. With Enter the Cave, we felt that if we could capture their imagination and attention by giving them something that they could experience on their own without being bombarded with an overt message, they in turn might feel some ownership about the experience and would be comfortable talking about it with their circle of friends."
Not every film or video game is right for the Enter the Cave treatment—it's safe to assume that other upcoming Sony Pictures films Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo or Fun With Dick and Jane wouldn't benefit. For a film like The Cave that appeals to a gaming demographic, and focuses on a dark, foreboding atmosphere, the online game should prove to be a perfect marketing fit, and one that is sure to increase in popularity in the months and years to come.
"An interactive site like Enter the Cave is not for everyone. Forgetting for a moment the dark and claustrophobic subject matter of the film, we're also speaking to the nature of pull vs. push. More often than not a traditional film web site is designed as a passive experience, structured to push screenshots, trailers and cast bios at the user with as few clicks as possible. With this site, we're asking the user to do much of the work. Enter the Cave is not a web site that you can fully explore in 15 minutes. You need to pay serious attention to what is happening or you surely will meet a cruel demise -- kind of like life itself. That said, at the end of a session, the user experience is a far more rewarding one," concluded Prough, Johnson and Small.
Game Daily
Monday, June 27, 2005
