I wrote this as part of the application process for Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners (goodbysilverstein.com) about five or six months ago. I’m pretty proud of it, so it seemed like a good enough way to kick off my blog. The prompt was to describe an innovative or cutting edge advertising campaign that impressed you and explain why.
One of the best campaigns I have ever seen is the “I Love Bees” project crafted by 42 Entertainment for Bungie/Microsoft/Halo 2. It took the concept of Alternative Reality Games (ARGs) as advertising and elevated it to a whole new level of interactivity, engagement, and promotion. I am fascinated by ARGs and I think they present an incredibly interesting and cutting edge way to engage fans and potential customers in whatever product or experience is being promoted.
“I Love Bees” was not the first ARG, but it was one of the most elaborate and best known. It was also largely responsible for the spread of ARGs as a form of viral advertising. The success 42 Entertainment had with “I Love Bees” led to their involvement in a variety of other ARG campaigns for top clients like “Year Zero” for Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, “Why So Serious?” for The Dark Knight, and “Flynn Lives” for Tron: Legacy. It also led to ARG campaigns run by other companies, like LOST’s “The LOST experience” and the recent Portal 2 ARG.
An ARG is a campaign that mixes web-based interactivity, a sweeping story focused around a mystery of some kind, and a series of challenges for the players to beat in order to unlock the next step of the story. The challenges can be anything from visual or logic puzzles to complex code decryption or global scavenger hunts. The key to making an ARG successful is engaging a large community, often worldwide, in collectively tackling these challenges in order to move the story forward. The players in an ARG consist of anyone who gets sucked into the challenge of discovering the hidden story. These are often diehard fans of the promoted franchise that can’t wait to get any information about the new product being released. However, it can also be anyone who is a fan of uncovering a mystery, cracking a code, or is intrigued by an interestingly told story. Each engages in the material in a different way, based on their motivations.
While there are early examples of using web-based interactivity in promotions similar to the ARG format, like with Starship Titanic in ’97, the first ARG to achieve mainstream success was “The Beast.” It was developed to raise awareness for AI: Artificial Intelligence and was designed by a team at Microsoft as cross-promotion for both the movie and the video game based on the property. It ended up attracting a large following whose sole focus was participating in the ARG. The community even coined its name, “The Beast,” after the number 666 appeared in its design. This campaign demonstrated a proof of concept for an entirely new way to interact with potential customers, and the designers of “The Beast” left Microsoft to start their own company, 42 Entertainment.
42 Entertainment was soon asked by their old colleagues at Microsoft to promote the latest offering in the popular Halo franchise: Halo 2. What they came up with was the ARG “I Love Bees.” Just like with any ARG, 42 Entertainment knew their first step would be promoting early involvement in the game by a targeted demographic of player: people primed to enjoy the “I Love Bees” experience. Success in this early stage would lead to the most vibrant community, the most customer engagement, and the most positive buzz throughout the course of the game. They accomplished this with a two-pronged attack. The first prong sent previous ARG participants jars of honey that contained cryptic messages and a timetable. Once deciphered, these messages led the recipients to ilovebees.com, a site supposedly dedicated to beekeeping. In actuality, it was the first clue in the ARG’s elaborate, unfolding storyline. The second prong was to include flash frames at the end of the Halo 2 theatrical trailer, mixed in with the shots of the Xbox logo and website. These flash frames contained the URL ilovebees.com as well. What is clever here is how 42 Entertainment artfully targeted the two groups who would get the most enjoyment from playing the game: ARG enthusiasts and Halo fans. The ARG enthusiasts were drawn in by an enjoyment of the genre. Halo fans were brought in by the quest for information about the game unavailable anywhere else or by curiosity about the link they discovered in the trailer. By drawing from ARG lovers and the most curious of Halo fans, 42 Entertainment made sure they had a community that would not only keep moving the story forward, but would have a really good time doing it. That enjoyment and enthusiasm would help spread the word about the game through word of mouth. The more people heard about “I Love Bees,” the more the campaign succeeded in reaching an audience.
The next step was setting up the challenges. To give an example of how elaborate “I Love Bees” could get, one puzzle involved a series of seemingly random number strings that, once deciphered, represented GPS coordinates and time codes. When players went to those coordinates they discovered payphones that would ring according to the clue’s timetables. In some cases when the players answered, they heard prerecorded messages that they had to copy down, but in other cases they reached an “operator,” a real person that was part of the game, that they communicated with directly. Each of these challenges, in addition to being fun for the players, engaged them more and more in the mythology of the game, which in turn engaged them more and more in the mythology of the product. The deeper and more complex the puzzles and challenges got, the more the players were committed to solving the puzzles, beating the challenges, and advancing.
“I Love Bees” concluded the story with a big reveal. A message was accidentally sent into space, summoning the Covenant (the antagonist alien race of the Halo universe) to Earth for a full-scale invasion. It is worth noting that this is the first time any part of “I Love Bees” had a story element that linked it to the Halo franchise. Since one of the first hints of “I Love Bees” was hidden in the Halo 2 trailer and events in the game were constantly related to the Halo franchise, like an exclusive opportunity to play a demo of Halo 2, the community quickly understood the connection between the ARG and the franchise, despite the stories being only weakly related for most of the experience.
So what made “I Love Bees” such a success? And why do ARGs in general work? They work because they accomplish most of the goals of advertising, but they do so in a very interesting and unique way.
The biggest success of ARGs is with consumer engagement. Companies want a captive audience of current and potential customers they can engage with in the context of their products or services. Every company that starts a social networking department to handle its Facebook and Twitter presence, or adopts a mantra of transparency, understands this. “I Love Bees” achieves that consumer engagement through the game. The more the game is played, the deeper the players get into the world, and the more engaged in the process they become. This translates into a captive audience, a situation that can be leveraged into promotion through every element of the game itself. The end goal can be tied to the product, the challenges can be tied to the product, and even the central story can be tied to the product. And all along the way those players can be subtly reminded of the product. That said, this power should be used sparingly, as players will rebel against being force-fed a marketing message.
ARGs also generate positive brand association. The players of ARGs grow to love the game, so when they discover a certain company or product is behind the game, they subconsciously feel positive about that association. It’s a similar concept to endorsement deals and sports sponsorships. “That thing I love is made possible by this company, so I feel good about that company and what they do/make.” For companies with established fan bases it’s a way to solidify brand loyalty, and for newer or more obscure companies it’s a way to get recognized.
Part of what makes ARGs work is that they are done very rarely. They are quite popular among certain communities, so this scarcity makes every new ARG generate a lot of attention online very quickly, especially if it’s associated with an established franchise or company. Even if only a small number of players are actively playing, their progress becomes newsworthy. Online publications will discuss the ARG, publish the latest revealed tidbits, and engage their whole readership, not just the players themselves, in the progress of the game. Often, this discussion will also be in the context of the company or product that is behind the game. This is basically free publicity. Who doesn’t love free publicity? An example of this is the Portal 2 ARG. Valve is a well-known gaming company, and the Portal series had great momentum coming off of its first title, so there was built-in interest in the franchise. When Valve started their ARG, every piece of information decoded by the players found its way to gaming news sites where it was able to reach a broader audience. Potential customers everywhere were being made aware of the upcoming release of Portal 2, as well as becoming at least peripherally engaged with the ARG as its unfolding was rebroadcast. This was a win/win for Valve’s publicity department.
Story can play a huge role in how an ARG pulls its players into the world of the product it is trying to sell. For example, in the “Why So Serious?” campaign for The Dark Knight, a key element of the ARG was continued references to the Joker and Harvey Dent in a real world setting. Fans were tasked with picture taking scavenger hunts (which revealed images of the Joker) and were treated to faux campaign ads for Harvey Dent’s run for district attorney (often vandalized by the Joker). These were especially effective because they added another layer of world building to the Batman universe. The story directly tied to the product the ARG designers were promoting, and the pay off for the player was a deeper understanding of the world of Batman. This made “Why So Serious?” especially good at engaging its players and the engagement they felt in the ARG translated directly to the engagement the designer wanted them to feel for the movie. For non-fans of the Batman franchise, any interest in the story of the game made you want to see the movie, as it was another piece to the game-story’s puzzle. For fans, on the other hand, playing the game presented another way to be involved in the world of Batman, which in turn reinforced positive brand association.
This is why entertainment properties seem to be the most successful with ARGs. They already have a story on which to base the ARG, the story of the property itself, and that tie-in creates a powerful link between the ARG and the actual product. Such a built-in story can be helpful, but that doesn’t make it necessary. I mentioned earlier that “I Love Bees” was only tangentially related to the story of Halo 2. In fact, it was developed with essentially no input from Bungie at all. Some years later, in an interview, Bungie even acknowledged that the story of “I Love Bees” was not originally intended to be part of the Halo universe. So clearly, ARGs can work without being tied to the world-building aspects of an entertainment property. This means there is more to the success of ARGs as advertising than their direct ties to a certain franchise.
I think a lot can be learned from the success of ARGs. The current advertising world can sometimes look bleak. People talk about piracy killing broadcast television, and by association broadcast advertising; TIVO, AppleTV and Netflix creating advertising free ways to consume content, and ad-blindness on the web killing CPC and CPM models. ARGs demonstrate that what is really needed is a new approach. I’m not saying the broadcast advertising is dead. It isn’t. And I’m not saying that web advertising is dead. It isn’t either. What I am saying is that in the modern world, packed with so many things competing for our attention, people crave an interactive experience. They want to feel involved with the companies, brands, and products they support. They want to feel a human connection. And they want to be advertised to in a way that is less intrusive and less abrasive. ARGs are able to accomplish these things because they are designed to create an interactive experience shared by thousands of participants and millions of followers that promotes a product without Advertising it.
I value the uniqueness of ARGs and I certainly don’t believe every company or every product is right for such a campaign. However, adopting these ideas in other types of campaigns, like designing interactive experiences with more subtlety in how they deliver their message, can create a positive user experience that will stand out from the masses of passive advertisements that fill our lives.