Nine Inch Nails- Year Zero

NIN- Year Zero

Year Zero is two things a) an Alternative Reality Game about “the end of the world” with repeated references to “the future of things” and the United States Military and b) it’s a new Album released by the band Nine Inch Nails. The frontman Trent Reznor insists the ARG wasn’t a gimmick to boost CD sails but it’s undeniable that this went some way to boosting the sails of their most recent release.

The ARG employed a whole range of tactics including band t-shirts with links to a site kicking off the ARG, the ‘leaking’ of flash drives containing songs off the new album and with various images placed somehow within the track only viewable via the spectrogram of the track, phone numbers placed within the spectrogram of later leaked tracks which further involve the user in game. Throughout this the term “Art is resistence!” emerged which links to a site where you can access stickers/posters/flyers/desktop backgrounds/avatars to promote Year Zero. Apart from direct exposure via stuff like posters/t-shirts/flyers etc. this caused an enormous hub via the internet and a key part of the ARG was done via the internet which did a lot to promote the concept as well as the band and the most recent album. The aim was to blur the boundaries between the ARG and reality to get people to react but the idea is novel and something like this hasn’t been done to quite this extent before which has done a lot to make a name for Year Zero, being viral was key to its success.

SIGG

SIGG

SIGG is a Swiss company that manufacturers eco-friendly reusable water bottles. The high end aluminum bottles cost around $20 and come in a wide range of designs. They’re quite popular with the eco-friendly crowd, but SIGG was looking for a viral campaign that would engage users and drive interest in their Lifestlye line of water bottles. The Lifestyle line features eye catching designs and had already generated quite a bit of interest from customers.

They manufactured and spread the word about a viral contest which allowed the consumer to submit their own designs for the water bottles. This meant they attracted a niche audience admittedly but this is something customers had been wanting to do for ages and proved to be hugely successful. The campaign drew more than 12,000 visits from roughly 8,000 consumers. The average visit length was 17 minutes which smashes the U.S. average of 49 seconds. Before the contest ended, more than 170 bottle designs had been submitted by consumers so in this sense it was immensely successful!

Subservient Chicken

Subservient Chicken

Was a campaign by Burger King to advertise a new product, the TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. The tagline is “Chicken the way you want it” or “Have it your way” and the result is a programme where you can effectively get a man in a chicken suit to do what you want which is exactly the tagline Burger King wanted developed by this campaign. This plays on humour and the idea “is it a programme or really a guy in a chicken suit?” which generates discussion and the conveyance of the idea amongst it’s target audience whilst subconsciously implanting the brand in the mind of the consumer.

That was the intention at least, whilst is was a very clever concept it’s questionable as to how successful the campaign really was. Their was not much to keep a consumer on the page for long and after a few commands the experience quickly wears thin and can seem quite transparent. People did send the link on and it did cause conversation, but about the chicken.. not Burger King. It wasn’t obvious and to be honest I couldn’t remember what it was advertising at first all I could put together was “fast food+chicken=KFC”. Since I don’t eat fast food in the first place this advert provided a few cheap thrills but didn’t really win me over to be honest.

Simpsonize Me

Simpsonize Me

Simpsonize Me is an instance of two different ‘products’ coming together to promote themselves with particular success. Burger King and the Simpson’s collaborated to create a flash site where someone could upload a photo of themselves and magically be transformed into a Simpson’s style character. It was a relatively simple idea aimed at plugging burger king and the new Simpson movie back when it was still new. The yellow skin of a Simpson is a unique feature which is instantly recognisable for most people and it proved infectious as a number of people started replacing their profile picture on various social networking sites with their simpsonized version of themselves which in turn got people scouring the net for ways to turn themselves into a Simpson character too which brought back to Burger King advertisements.

This was effective as the Simpson’s are already a famous part of western TV culture and I think a lot of people have always secretly wondered what the Simpsons would look like if you saw them for real or what you would look like as a Simpson, so this played on a sense of curiosity and peoples exposure to a already very successful brand and then gave people the chance to directly expose themselves or adopt that brand onto themselves which they could then go about and show everybody else, which of course is viral marketing.