World's Worst War

This campaign from Japan is amazing. I was alterted to it by the Faster Future blog, and everything I read about it intrigues me more.

Tomi Ahonen digs deeper - Tahato is a Japanese snack food maker. They launched two new snacks in Ocdtober last year, "Tyrant Habanero Burning Hell Hot", and the "Satan Jorquia Bazooka Deadly Hot".

Tohato's agency, Hakuhodu, created a campaign for the launch that effectively created an mobile massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), enabled through QR codes.

Each pack had a QR code on it, representing the two sides, Tyrant and Satan. Players chose their team, then scanned in the code and could start playing. They advanced through the ranks of players by recruiting other players to join (the agency actually calls this their pyramid scheme...), and could then choose from 31 battlefields to play against the other team.

The actual battles happened online at 4am, when the network was quietest. Players became obsessed, discussing strategies online, using social networks. The campaign generated 100,000 page views per day, with a news alert system telling players what was going on in the games, including who had died, got promoted or whatever, and which team wom different battles.

This is an absolutely revolutionary campaign in it's use of media and engagment among the players. Not surprisingly Hakuhodu won a Yellow pencil at the D&ADs.

You can see a (very OTT) D&AD submission film here.

The film ends, rather ominously with the news "World's Worst War 2 - Coming Soon!"