While it takes way too much work to get to the payoff, this online game, tipped to us by Sanj and covered by Defamer, for Paul Walker's new movie, Running Scared, let's you play Paul Walker in a Grand Theft Auto-style game with the prize being...yes...to go down on Paul Walker's wife. Trouble is, you have to jump through age verification hoops, use a cheat code and play a bit of the game before you can bring the wife to a screaming orgasm. Not exactly the kind of movie promotion the MPAA will be fond of but the movie's target audience, horned up middle school boys will love it.
Adverblog points to an online game created through a partnership between Google Earth and Fiat to promote the car makers Sedici SUV. Players use Google Earth to search the snow-covered terrain at Turin for points indicating four hidden Sedici vehicles and a pass to the Ferrari 360 Experience, a travel package that includes a Ferrari plant tour and test drive. Players can only win the car if they live in Italy, France, Great Britain, Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Spain.
To promote its new Harrison Ford family-man-in-peril (does he do no other?) movie, Firewall, Warner Brothers has launched Inside the Firewall, a site created by Pod Digital which introducs a game in which the player has to find his way out of a room using available clues. Apparently, the game's getting alot of buzzz in forums with players exchanging clues and hints. Us? We're just going to go see the movie to see how Harrison gets out of yet another one of his messes.
Lending a bit of humor to the daunting tax season and promoting its TaxCut while doing so, H&R Block has launched Deduct-a-Buck, a seventies-style game show-like game hosted by Max Refund. The game consists of five questions relating to the kinds of thing one can deduct when filing taxes. Prizes range from a Dell XPS Notebook, to a $100 GameStop gift certificate to free online tax preparation. Created by Mullen, the game is both humorous and comforting to what's on the mind of everyone as April 15 approaches and we all struggle to please Uncle Sam.
Japanese footwear company Onitsuka Tiger, known as ASICS in the States, has launched an online karaoke game, Lovely Football, in support of the company's new football (soccer) shoe Injector DX. On the site, the Onitsuka Tiger National Choir performs and after viewing the competition, visitors can sing along with the choir karaoke style and enter their performance in a contest to win a pair of Injector DX or other Onitsuka Tiger goodies.
This year, there seems to be a fascination with the flushing of toilets during halftime. Like the obsession with national toilet flush stats following M*A*S*H, Scott tissue will leverage the notion that all 90 million Super Bowl viewers will collectively go to the bathroom at the same time with the launch of Halftime Flush, a site touting the dissolvability of Scott toilet paper. On the site, Mike Ditka lends his intense convicibility to Scott's superior toilet tissue and a game allows visitors to match toilets to their flushing sounds. OK, so bathroom humor is always a good standby but we like VIA's simpler approach to the whole halftime flush thing.
Heineken, the official beer sponsor of The 48th Annual GRAMMY Awards, is launching their second nationwide advertising campaign on Internet jukeboxes throughout the United States on Ecast's interactive jukebox network. The campaign will run on 4400 broadband-enabled jukeboxes in bars and taverns throughout the country. The campaign features a Heineken micro-site, downloadable collections of music from Grammy-winning artists, and a Heineken-branded trivia game.
The Internet has done many wonderful things but it's also enabled some elaborate, not completely above board marketing efforts such is the insertion of geographically targeted Subway ads into an online game without the knowledge of Valve, the game's creator. Read the convoluted story and the intricate chain of agencies and vendors involved in this campaign which, while Valve wasn't happy about it, was an admirable effort, legal issues aside.
It takes a lot to amuse us but this game promoting job site dice.com did the trick. It's the classic "your boss sucks" game where you get to take out your aggression following a bosses cocky, buzz-word laden tirade. Don't miss the pizza launcher in the Project manager's office.
Random Culture points to Disaffected, an anti-advergame of sorts in that, rather than lauding a brand, it pokes fun at a brand. It was created by Persuasive Games to show distaste for the apparent lack of competence displayed by FedEx Kinko's workers. As described on Persuasive's site, "Disaffected! gives the player the chance to step into the demotivated position of real FedEx Kinkos employees. Feel the indifference of these purple-shirted malcontents first-hand, and consider the possible reasons behind their malaise - is it mere incompetence? Managerial affliction? Unseen but serious labor issues?"
While there are plenty of brand hate sites out there, Persuasive Games created the game to demonstrate that all advergames don't have to be all about brand love. We haven't played the game nor do we know if this is a first but we do like the idea. Gotta love dissent.
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