In 2005 I came across a brilliant marketing stunt done by Microsoft regarding their soon to be released console at that time the Xbox 360. I was really impressed as it is a good example of marketing a product before launch and also a good example of viral marketing. If someone don’t know what does viral marketing means it is a marketing technique that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives.
They executed this by developing an alternate reality game (ARG) called OurColony. This was not the first time Microsoft was executing an ARG and a viral marketing campaign for launching a product. They did this earlier also with the marketing campaign of Halo2 by creating I Love Bees which I will be giving details about that some other day. What they did was that they invited people from ARG community by sending them e-mails from a person called Gamem8ker. I first heard about it at gamespot.com in a news article which told that the site was giving glimpses of the next-gen Xbox. From there I got to know about the website which was hosting it. The name of the website is ourcolony.net. The ARG section has been closed down now in fact the website has now been changed. When I first visited the site it required a password which I didn’t have. It was something exclusive and only selected few could play that game. This made me wanted to know what was going on and this was the target of Microsoft to create an interest in the whole gamming community which I think they successfully accomplished it. The game was that you have to make a team by inviting other people to the site and the Gamem8ker would give different objectives to complete. After finishing the task in hand the team would be rewarded by different images of the console and the games which were released with the console. The last reward of the game was a five-minute video featuring interviews of Xbox 360 team members about hardware and software features.
No comments:
Post a Comment