BMW Turns a Z4 into a Crayon

The new iPhone game from BMW allows users to customize a Z4, then by driving it, draw pictures. The free game comes as another clever marketing tool targeting BMW owners and fans. Users can choose a color of paint then steer their virtual Z4, using the tires to draw. It will be interesting to see if any Z4 owners try it in real life. You can view a video of the game in action here:

The game, named after the ad campaign, “An Expression of Joy”, was created by mobile game developer Artificial Life and is free for any iPhone/iPod Touch users.

53% of all American adults play video games

The latest from PEW Research’s Internet & American Life Project show that gamers now make up over half of the population. This statistic refers not to children but to adults. While it’s no surprise that the amount of time playing video games decreases with age, meaning younger adults play more, almost a third of adults 65+ play games every day. This is three times as much as younger players, of whom only 20% play every day.

Gaming is represented in computers, consoles, cell phones and other mobile devices:

75% of 18-29 year old gamers play on consoles
68% of 18-29 year old gamers play on computers

Of all ages, computers are the most popular gaming platform:

Computers: 73%
Consoles: 53%
Cell phones: 35%
Portable gaming devices: 25%

Read the full Pew Report here.

Most Mobile Gamers are Women

Unsurprising statistics were just released by gaming company Mpowerplay that a majority of mobile gamers are female. To those outside the industry this probably comes as a shock to their vision of gamers being late teen boys with pasty pimply faces. To those of us that deal with demographics and psychographics it is expected. After all, while most platform gamers may be adult men, casual gamers are primarily women. Mobile games aren’t at the same graphic or interactive level as platform games, so it makes sense that most of them cater to casual gamers. The numbers are a bit surprising: of 50,000 game downloaders, 65% were women, 18-34.

Based on these numbers it seems like smart marketers would be looking to branded gaming to help seek out these consumers. I’m just saying…

Mpowerplay’s numbers are based on download statistics of it’s mobile games.

Read the whole story here.

Doritos Expands Super Bowl Video Contest

Doritos’ Super Bowl commercial contest has exploded (in orange, all over the place). Well over 1000 videos have been submitted for voting on which will make it to the Super Bowl. There are many funny submissions and many terrible ones. One of my favorites, which offers Doritos the ability to “grow” the idea of the Dorito tree (would I like to handle that experiential campaign):

You can vote on your favorites, once a day, but must register.

VOTE NOW!!!

Fitness Freebie From Fast Food Franchises

Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silver’s, and A&W (all owned by the same company) have created a fitness help site. Apparently the site (http://www.efit4me.com) is to assuaged their guilt over making you fat and sluggish.

Burger King Helps You Get Angry

Burger King and their ingenious agency have launched a new viral campaign that lets you flame-broil your friends, family and office anger-target. The site (http://www.angry-gram.com) lets you fill-in the blanks using one of dozens of options an angry email, similar to MadLibs. Your target then gets an angry, hopping, yelling Whopper teelling them off.

Murder Mystery ARG Breathe launches.

Set up to run over a 4 week period, Breathe, from London’s Expanding Universe, looks to be as creepy as it gets. Using YouTube, blogs,IM, phones, and GPS, this looks to be an excellent experiential endeavor. Only London residents can participate in the real world aspects of the game, while anyone can “enjoy” the online assets.
Stay tuned for more info.

Website:
http://www.breathewith.me/

Salon.com’s Year in Viral Video

Salon.com has announced it’s top viral videos from 2008. My how the election made things fun! Obama and Palin only outshined by Christian the Lion, NBC enlists Tina Fey to beat out other networks’ online video.

Read More Here.

My Current Favorites:

BMW Shoots Viral Piece, Does it Hit or Miss?

Earlier this year BMW launched a viral video to promote the launch of it’s new model in the U.S. The video was released as a documentary following the stories of a small Bavarian town named Oberpfaffelbachen. The town’s citizens include a stunt driver, over zealous police chief, event promoter and mayor, trying to save the town from hard financial times. They devise a promotion in which they will launch a 300 horse power BMW 1 Series from a 454 meter (1486.5 feet) ramp from Bavaria, across the Atlantic to the U.S. The town has created an entire festival around the event called Rampenfest. Towns folk are turning their houses into gift shops, town managers are tearing down forests for parking. I won’t give away the ending, but obviously something goes wrong. Not as dramatically as I’d hoped unfortunately.

The quality of the video is excellent, the acting, direction and effects (as subtle as the ramp, as obvious as the teeth) as good as a movie. The video has been seen by millions which can give BMW the opportunity to claim a positive impact, especially considering that it was shot overseas and cost far less than a U.S. 30 second spot. Was it successful? It’s hard to say.

As with any viral, guerilla or virtual advertising, it is hard to judge success. Many still talk about the negative impact of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla stunt, requiring a payout of 2 million to the city of Boston to cover lawsuits and the cost of our crack bomb squad (who apparently can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a light brite!). The press loves to bring up the GM (Chevy) Yukon promotion run on YouTube. Many people made anti-SUV ads from the audio and video clips GM posted in the make-you-own commercial promotion. This brings us to what determines success.

The GM promotion was considered a failure because of the thousands of ads that were created that shed a positive light on the Yukon, there were a few that were negative. But, is that a bad thing? Most people learn by making mistakes or being told they’re wrong. Negative feedback is just as important, if not more important than positive feedback. How will you know how to improve your product unless people tell you what they DON’T like about it? GM learned that there are alot of people that consider their giant SUV bad for the environment and a gas guzzler. If this prompts them to make eco-friendly, gas-conscious improvements to their vehicles, is that a bad thing for the company or the consumer?

And let’s not forget that with the launch of the BMW campaign, the GM promotion was brought up as a failure again. Really? The Chevy Yukon is mentioned in the press for another car manufacturer’s promotion and that’s a bad thing? Sounds like free press to me. Even when a guerilla or viral campaign can’t be measured in sales or doesn’t have quite the immediate impact a company would hope, there is always the fact that it will continue to keep the brand in the public’s conscience for months and years to come.

Brand visibility is the best way to consider whether or not your viral or guerilla campaign is effective. You can’t often track sales back to a campaign like this or even sign-ups. You may get a solid number of visits to your microsite, but when visitors pull down your video, or assets, or talk about it in their blog, it can be difficult to track especially since those co-opted branding placements end up living for months out of your control.

So, how successful will the BMW campaign be? Well, they millions of viewers at the moment. Add on a few million views of the video once people (like me) download the clip to their iPod/iPhone and show it around, upload it to their YouTube, MySpace, Facebook or blog accounts, hundreds of discussions of it in marketing or news related blogs (where I found it) and then it’s recurring mention every time another automaker or major corporation does a viral or guerilla campaign and it sounds like a success to me.

But BMW knows this. They were arguably one of the first to use viral video not just as a tool to sell cars but a way to engage consumers with their brand, and to redefine their brand as cool. I still have a DVD copy of the BMW Movies from the promotion in 2001. The shorts were directed by Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, John Woo, Tony Scott, John Frankenheimer and featured Forest Whitakker, Madonna, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke and others. It received rave reviews at Cannes, from the New York Times, and Time magazine. They very successfully hit their middle-age, married, 150k/yr target.

The new spot however, at least in the words of Marketing VP Jack Pitney, was, rather than target a demographic, to target a psychographic. While most companies want to stick to categorizing their demographics by generation, age and finances, BMW is smart enough to know that they can pull an 8 year old boy and an 58 year old woman into their brand halo just by virtue of the fact that they may share common interests, like flashy cars, or mockumentaries.

Despite my feeling that this viral video may be a bit long for most viewers (35 minutes), I’m fairly certain that the folks at BMW will be pleased with the outcome. And I’m happy to help them broadcast their brand (even though I drive the “other” german car)!

Links:
Official Film Site

BMW Films Wikipedia

BMW Films Site (no videos here)

BMW Film “Star” (you can find the rest of the films here as well)

Digg submission where I first found out about the promotion