Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Have you heard of Layer Tennis? In short it's two creatives going head to head in battle of skills. The match involves both combatants swapping a single file back & forth in realtime with 15 minutes to complete their "volley". After each volley, commentary is provided by an independent 3rd party. Winners are determined by voting via Twitter by including the #LYT hastah + the contestant of choice.

Friday's match featured Shaun Inman vs. Aaron Scamihorn, and was won by Shaun Inman with his final "volley": Sheep Not Found aka Layer 10. If you're interested the semi-finals are scheduled to kick off tomorrow, June 26th, and the finals will be on July 10th.

Very fun to follow along. Also - as an FYI, Layer Tennis is sponsored by Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Patrick Dunphy

Got that new "C-O-M-C-A-S-T" song stuck in your head?  The catchy indie-folk tune is the only audio in a new Comcast TV spot about all the cool stuff you can do via their Triple-Play service package.  In the TV spot, people sing the song as they move around diagonally on a beautifully rendered isometric grid.

Online, the recently launched "ComcastTown" site keeps the song as a looping background track while giving you a bank account and a library of furnishings to decorate your own apartment and share it with your friends via Facebook and email.

I quickly and easily decorated my "studio" with furniture, brick walls, a faux-panda rug, a couple of turntables and a "maneki neko" lucky cat statue. One thing I found annoying was its auto-notify feature telling my Facebook network as I added each item. Overall, though, I was very happy with my decorating results and the ease of use selecting items and moving them around the isometric sandbox.

IMHO this site is a great way for Comcast to show how it can play a central role as a digital media provider/connector in customers' homes, while reiterating its Triple Play offering. The charming illustrations of the town and room furnishings go a long way to put a soft touch on this branded experience. The seamless Facebook integration also helps to make this socially entertaining and ensures a wide reach.

Jay Bain

When I went to Wired's Next Fest last October, I had the opportunity to play an upcoming game for PlayStation 3 called Flower created by ThatGameCompany. Instead of killing people, monsters, or zombies like the Top 10 Games of 2008, Flower is about roaming in a dream like environment, and helping flowers to bloom.

Each level takes place in a different flower's dream. The goal of the game is to guide the petal into other vivid color flowers in this never ending field, triggering more flower spreading around in this world. During my 10 minutes with the game, there were no instruction anywhere to teach me how to play, but as a "professional button presser", I quickly learned how to control it by tilting the controller to move around the scene. The sublime movement made me feel like I was just a gust of wind. The more petals you collect, the more sounds samples you will reveal to create a beautiful melody. It's not only visually stimulating, it interacts with sound, making you feel relaxed and calm... which you don't often feel playing a video game.

Jenova Chen described Flower as a video game version of a poem. It sounds a bit abstract, but I'm looking forward to see how the game developers can take this "interactive art form" to the next level.

Euphenia Cheng

When YouTube added video annotations back in June 2008, the result was a slew of Pop-Up Video style entries and generally annoying commentary. The most interesting examples that really took advantage of the medium were a few Choose Your Own Adventure storylines and bad card tricks. But in the past month, YouTube video "games" have started appearing on the site. Above is a simple but addictive Oscar Photo Hunt and below is fairly ambitious Street Fighter game (thanks Eric Diem). Enjoy!

Marta Strickland

I'm not an avid baseball fan but I do enjoy partaking in my boyfriend's Yankee season tickets a few times a year. Recently, an announcement on the NY Post about changes to Yankee stadium caught my attention:

"Instant replays and a variety of camera angles will soon be accessible via cellphone, and fans may even be able to dial up hot dogs and beer, team officials announced yesterday." NY Post

I'm a little bit torn. On one hand, it seems that it will take away from the classic "experience" of the game. There's something about baseball that makes you think of a father/son enjoying some bonding time, hot dogs and waving giant foam fingers. But on the other hand, the experience is already so far from that with $10 beers, overweight men with the team's name spelled out on their stomachs and homerun balls selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Sporting events, especially baseball games (perhaps because of the America's Pastime references), feel like large social gatherings. Thousands of people coming together to share the experience of rooting for their team. There's a collective feeling of "we". This technology makes it more about the "me". People will spend more time staring at their phones and seatbacks instead of high-fiving the strangers around them after a stellar play.

I'd like to see them take this technology even further. Interactive games that folks can play against one another on the large stadium screens, creating/voting on songs/playlists, posting photos they take at the stadium for all to see... make it a "Personalized We" experience.

Tracy Richards

Video games are becoming more and more Web 2.0 (and beyond) every day. With recent releases like Little Big Planet, it's pretty clear that we can expect more and more social networking functionality to be used by the video game industries.

For example, Microsoft is releasing its new Dashboard for the Xbox 360 in mid-November which will allow people do to all kinds of amazing things together. You will be able to create your own avatar (much like the "Mii" for Nintendo Wii), but you will be able to take this avatar into a virtual 'party room' where you will be able to verbally communicate with your friends via Xbox Live.

Instead of only communicating, Microsoft is going one step further. They have partnered with Netflix to incorporate their streaming movie service into Xbox Live. This will allow one person in the party to select and start streaming a movie, which all people in the party room can watch, while communicating with each other in real time. Basically, it's a virtual, multi-person movie theatre.

I've been playing video games since I could walk, I can't wait to see what they do next!

Daryl Brewer

There have been several stories on the incredible use of virtual media by the Obama campaign. All their campaign events have been streamed live on his site, they use Twitter to keep people informed about them, they launched their own iPhone application - and they're not done yet. The Obama campaign is now advertising in a very popular video game for the Xbox 360.

The game, called "Burnout: Paradise", features an open world which you drive, race, trick, and crash your way through in any way you see fit (you can get details about the game here). It features billboards (a lot of which you can crash through) that companies are able to buy advertising on, just like real billboards (In fact, I believe Dodge has already done it for this game). This in itself represents an incredible way of reaching an audience of millions of (generally) younger people.

Here is a screenshot taken by an Xbox 360 gamer of the billboard which the Obama campaign has paid for. At first, most people didn't believe it; they thought it was somebody's clever Photoshop job. But then Electronic Arts (the makers of the game) confirmed that the Obama campaign has indeed paid for advertising within the game. Brilliant.

In-game advertising is not a new concept, but for a political campaign to be savvy enough to realize this opportunity exists and take advantage of it is really impressive. I really believe as video games continue to move to take advantage of the power of social networking, this is the type of advertising we will see a LOT more of. And therein lies a tremendous opportunity for Organic.

The challenges for this type of advertising will be game-specific - how can advertising be blended in without having it stick out like a sore thumb? Gamers are very, very passionate about their hobby, and while they will instinctively reject a really obvious marketing ploy, they will also applaud those that are done in a clever yet non-intrusive manner. Sounds like a heck of a fun project to me!

As in-game advertising opportunities continue to grow (and they will!), I think we will see a lot of VERY cool opportunities to show off our Exceptional Experience abilities.

You can read about this story right here.

Daryl Brewer

Little Big Planet is one of those games that defies explanation. On Friday, Eric Diem wrote, "I can't find the words to describe what a unique experience this game produces, so I figured it would just be easier to bring in my PS3 in so everyone can check it out."

So he did, and the impression that he left on the office was monumental. Jeff Bossardet confessed to me, "It is gorgeous. I have never been a gamer. For many years now I have thought that it may be advantageous, as an interactive professional, to understand the gaming world from a users perspective. I think I have found my gateway drug I mean game...Little Big Planet."

Why were we all so excited? Little Big Planet isn't just a game. It is a way to make games, mold games, and share games. The only limits are that of human imagination.

In its simplest form, Little Big Planet is a platform game, but it is a game that teaches you how to create your own levels. It provides you with different materials and all the tools you need to turn those materials into moving, changing, and logical objects. These objects can be set to react to different changes in the environment or actions of the players. The result is the ability for every player with patience and practice to create entire video games of their own.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The social element of the game is another side to the revolution. All worlds can be "published", which means they are open for the entire community to play. Those worlds can be rated, tagged, and shared. And, if the world creator so chooses, they can give the objects they create (villains, tools, etc) as gifts to other players to use in their levels.

Some see this all as a bold move in consumer-generated gaming, and others see it as opening the door to other greater deeds in co-creation. But everyone agrees it is a HUGE step forward for the industry. Just look at this guy who defied game-makers expectations and created a working calculator. Prepare to be amazed:

Marta Strickland

The amazingly named Usain Bolt may be the fastest man in the world, winning gold and setting world records in every event he competed in at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Puma created a casual, but fun game where you can race against the Olympic champion. It's very nicely designed, *simple* and funny. Pick your colors, and use the spacebar and arrow keys to try to outsprint him.

If you hear the sound of crazy fast keyboard tapping today (and laughing), it's probably from this site.

Jay Bain

Mentos just launched a fun advergame called Mentos Kissfight, a head-to-head Mortal Kombat style fighting game where you throw kisses instead of punches. It comes are part of a larger campaign emphasizing the kissability of Mentos-freshened mouths. Other examples include their Kiss Cam web game, and the latest TV commercial for Mentos gum.

The game play is fun, but overall I think that the campaign misses a big opportunity by not integrating any social components. Mentos seemed to understand the importance of social media back when they were trying to reap the rewards of the Diet Coke Mentos phenomenon. However, this campaign seems to miss the boat.

They are not promoting the game to the game-obsessed social network demographic. They are not tapping into the fact that gamers like to share tips and brag with each other. You can't even play against other people!!

Cute concept, but ultimately shouldn't kissing be more of a social experience?

Marta Strickland