Monday, January 24, 2005

Great idea, but...

Here's a great idea.
General Motors are launching a new service, with a US teaser campaign.
They are revealing their message, hangman-like one part at a time, on billboards all across the US.
Every day a different billboard is revealed, and all revealed words so far are shown on their site:

They've even created a forum for people to report new billboards, and brainstorm what the whole sentence could be:

Except...

They cocked up. It's possible to read the full sentence in the flash source of the page, so it took precisely no time at all for the answer to be cracked.

More at Adrants

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gene Keenan wrote:

This reminds me in a weird way of the I Love Bees game, which was used as a marketing vehicle for the game Halo 2. It is a pretty complex game where users are given GPS coordinates of ringing pay phones around the country and when they answer and provide correct answers to recorded questions, it unlocks another episode in an internet based War of the Worlds style radio serial. It was a brilliant idea; it created community and working together to solve the problems. The GM game does not really accomplish this. OT, I think that as advertisors we often dumb stuff down too much there by diluting it. The I Love Bees game designers which were hired by Microsoft did just the opposite of over simplicity and it was a success. There were over a million unique visitors to the site and Halo 2 is one of the biggest games currently.
There is a great story about it here;
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65365,00.html
There is a book coming out in February about Alternate Reality Gaming
http://www.immersivegaming.com/about.html
Gene Keenan

Dan said...

That's very cool. We've been trying to think of ways of using GPS for a while - on the lines of GeoCaching - and the only other example I'd seen was a campaign that Jeep did last summer:

http://jeep.geocaching.com/

Jeep did pretty well, I think, and GeoCaching and Jeep/SUVs sort of go hand in hand anyway. The Halo campaign definitely takes the concept to a much more advanced level - by creating a community for example.

More about GeoCaching (beware - it's a bit nerdy...):

http://www.geocaching.com/


Dan

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