Creating Interactive Fun and Games

This is my favorite part of this chapter. This case study will give you a first-class start at creating something online that’s truly remarkable and delightful. You won’t have to try to push people to do anything to get close to your brand. Fans almost greedily pursue this level of engagement.

In 2011, HBO began airing Game of Thrones, a TV series based on A Song of Ice and Fire, the award-winning series of high fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin.

To help raise awareness about the series, HBO contacted Campfire NYC, a marketing agency specializing in “social storytelling.” The novels are about swords, sex, and the quest for power at all costs. That’s pretty exciting promotional material. Nonetheless, Campfire NYC’s work was highly creative and wildly successful. Rarely has an ad campaign provided so many brilliant ideas and so much interactive fun for fans. Their experience can show you what’s possible with your own campaigns.

Creating engaged communities is crucial to your long-term success.

Enticing via aromas

Campfire NYC sent influencers an elaborate “Maester’s Path Scent Kit” intended to evoke the scents of key locations in the fantasy series. Each kit was a box crafted to match the design and art direction of the series, inside of which were yellowed scrolls and dusty, medieval-looking bottles. (See Figure 17-2.) The scents in the bottles were supposed to reflect the smells from places like Pentos and Winterfell, settings in the series. Game of Thrones bloggers went wild.

Within 48 hours, these key influencers were sharing this online via blog posts, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter just because they were so overjoyed to be included in the launch and because the scent kits were so lovingly crafted. It made the fantasy world of Game of Thrones become real in a tangible way.

Admittedly, this approach isn’t for everyone. If you’re a software developer, this may not work for you, but a restaurant can use this idea to appeal to an elite group of influencers online. Prominent food bloggers would probably be delighted to receive a well-presented, intricate scent experiment that involves the scents from your signature dishes. You can get wildly creative with how you present your experiment, too.

Presentation is everything. Make it special.

Creating immersive experiences

In the fantasy world of Game of Thrones, hanging out in a tavern and eavesdropping on the scuttlebutt from all that political intrigue is tons of fun. In the Game of Thrones online “sound experience” created by Campfire NYC, many a dark conspiracy is overheard in a tavern you can move around within. The experience looks and feels like a sophisticated game and yet serves to whet the appetite for the Game of Thrones HBO series that is to come.

Also, the “Viewer’s Guide” Campfire NYC created provides an informative map that features background information and a side panel that notes episode landmarks, as well as the more strategically important major landmarks. Of course, each section can be easily shared via social media with “share this story” callouts and sharing icons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr. (See Figure 17-3.)

More and more people are accessing the Internet via a mobile device, rather than sitting in front of a desktop. Where at all possible, make sure your web developers and designers create experiences that can be enjoyed online via all kinds of mobile phones and tablets.

Appealing via rich graphics

Using rich, textural graphics that captivate your visitor’s imagination can heighten any online experience. Unless your brand wants to come across as being slick, modern, or highly engineered, consider using graphics that look more organic.

In Game of Thrones, a 700-foot-tall wall of ice separates the civilized “Seven Kingdoms” from the wilderness beyond. Men positioned in castles on the wall guard against attackers. Campfire NYC created a graphically rich “on the wall” experience that conveys a sense of being on this enormous wall. This online experience educates visitors with Game of Thrones background storylines and enables them to experience the sights and sounds of being a watcher on the wall. They experience the cold isolation of those who protect the Seven Kingdoms. As a visitor, you almost feel like this place is real and that you’ve been there, if only for a little while.

In an effort to spread the message and translate this fantasy experience into something that feels real, Campfire NYC goes so far as to create a local climate-based application on iTunes that reads the weather in your locations and shows which region of the Game of Thrones world your weather most closely resembles. This can be a lot of fun for travelers or during the change of seasons. It also shows the lengths Campfire NYC went to in order to sweep visitors up into an experience. Campfire NYC and HBO designed this promotion to be spread more like wildfire (instead of a controlled burn), and gave visitors every opportunity to share this amazing series of experiences with their audiences online.

Whenever you’re stuck for ideas, ask yourself, “What would Campfire do?”

Tantalizing their taste buds

In a brilliant move, Campfire NYC partnered with a top chef to create dishes that might conceivably be part of the world shared in this fantasy series. Not only that, but it decided to create videos of the chef preparing Game of Thrones inspired food, explaining his recipes, and showing how it was to be served. It then shared them on YouTube and with traditional media outlets, such as TV news and radio.

Not satisfied with tantalizing the senses with some great food video and menu ideas, Campfire NYC sponsored food trucks to serve those dishes created by its chef and featured via video to prominent food bloggers at to-be-named locations in L.A. and New York City.

One featured menu includes squab with hot-spiced wine, nutmeg, raisins, leek and black bread pudding, served with sweet corn fritters and followed by lemon cakes. Of course, the menu was graphically represented in a medieval, Game of Thrones style in order to carry out the theme and a sense that visitors are indeed entering an entirely different dimension of experience — going where fantasy meets reality.

Traditional media outlets were going nuts interviewing fans and bloggers on the street as they waited for the food trucks and chatted with one another about the series and this shared experience. Every day had the atmosphere of a fan convention.

Each day’s dish was announced via a preview video on YouTube, only to be shared with followers on Twitter and Facebook. It’s a super clever way to build your following and train them to come back to you first, instead of the traditional media, for updates on where things are going next.

Going deeper

Campfire NYC leveraged all of this to take its more engaged fans much deeper into the fantasy world of Game of Thrones. Campfire NYC created free online games (see Figure 17-4) and community forums (see Figure 17-5). The games featured intricate puzzles and presented mysteries online that can only be solved with the help of other fans in the online communities. By the time this series had gotten ready to air, fans’ excitement had risen to a fever pitch, and the series continues to be a success season after season.