But the four-wheeled madness doesn’t stop there. Check out the above race from Hot Wheels, featuring a three-dimensional obstacle course projection-mapped on a building in Sydney. (Thanks to Karlin from MUSE for the tip.)

Speaking of races, check out the above clip from a Cornetto projection in Istanbul. In the midst of a big ol’ street party, the brand projected an interactive casual game where onlookers could compete against each other using their phones. As if an interactive projection didn’t have enough stopping power! It’s great to see that, no matter how many projection examples we share, someone always seems to be raising the bar on what’s possible with this medium.

Today’s post comes from Adam Stipanuk, Interactive Strategy Director at Upshot.

The nightly tooth brushing ritual with my two year old daughter goes something like this: we ask our child to say “Arrrr” like a pirate to allow us access to her pearly whites. When it’s all over, she gets to pick out a fun little sticker.  Success!

Mom and dad discovered the power of an incentive to motivate behavior, but the folks over at greengoose.com have one up’d us through technology. GreenGoose’s Points Giving Toothbrush turns a mundane daily activity into a fun and rewarding experience.

Essentially, a wireless sensor is applied to the toothbrush that communicates back to an egg-shaped base station.  The base station relays your lifestyle points data into a website where you can track your progress. You can then trade in points with other applications or partners offering rewards.

Oh, and here’s the best part… Their sensors also work on many other objects. I’m sure by the time my daughter is old enough to help out with household chores (sweeping the floor for example), the chores might no longer be considered work, but play.

The ability to flip the perception of an activity or product that usually elicits feelings of pessimism to optimism is a powerful concept. It will be interesting to see how game-like experience technologies like GreenGoose continue to level up in the next year and if marketers continue to make their brand experiences more fun.

So, if you’re a marketer, ask yourself the question: What current products/services could benefit from gaming mechanisms to nudge your consumers to an optimistic behavior?

Now: Thanks for reading.  Pick a sticker.

More articles about our Game On! Trend.
Last’s years blog where we first introduced GreenGoose: Drive Slow, Win Big

Today’s post is by Jaclyn Gordyan. Senior Art Director and perpetually curious mind, discover more about her at Upshot’s main site. Follow Jaclyn on Twitter @JGordyan.

All the Peeps, Jelly Bellys and Cadbury Creme Eggs have been eaten. So what’s one to do during the afternoon Easter lull? Kick it on the couch with the NBA playoffs and hit Facebook. Yup. Wait a minute, what’s this in my Facebook news feed- Bonobos is having an online Easter Egg hunt? For cash? I’m so game.

Bonobos (a high end online menswear store) offered Easter themed promotional codes, but you had to find them first. The promotion leveraged the idea of a digital Easter egg hunt but by making you work for the codes, it became a game. An addicting one. Oh look at that, it plays beautifully into our 2011 ‘Game On! trend’. Their promo codes were distributed in an unexpected way that effectively sparked their consumers’ curiosity. It was almost too effective, as the grand prize was found just 15 minutes after the promotion went live. Lesson for those launching a game- prepare for quick wins.

Back to the hunt. They don’t even sell women’s clothes, but had you better believe I was in it to win it. A ‘friendly’ competition between myself and friends heated up to find any code, but mainly the $500 egg. We happily (and feverously) surfed their site, fast becoming intimate with the product lines, and site navigation. This obviously added value to their brand by giving us a welcome distraction from the holiday afternoon lull. Alas, I lost*. The anecdote is just a small example of how consumers are willing to ‘play the game’ and engage with brands. So where was the ‘Golden Egg’? [SPOILER ALERT] It was right under our noses… err… fingers in the HTML code. You heard me correctly. A picture of a goose laying a golden egg with the promo code below it was created in simple text (see below). 

The only hiccup in this hunt was smart phone or tablet users were at a disadvantage having to jump through bigger hoops to see the goose in HTML code. But that’s what the other hidden $25-$100 promo codes were for. The brand still won with an inevitable lift in page hits and fans. Brilliant.

A few candy companies such as M&M, and Cadbury held online Easter egg hunts in years past, but their executions were obviously targeting different demographics.

*Note: My friend wasn’t the official winner as someone had already found & used the Golden Egg promo code. But he can still hold bragging rights over my head. Sigh.

By far, the number one activity on smartphones is mobile gaming. Games are the most downloaded apps in both free and paid categories in Apple’s App Store. Recently, adMob (a leading mobile ad network owned by Google) released the results of a survey that revealed games are also the most popular activity on tablet devices (think iPad), beating out email, search, social and shopping.

With games being all the rage, why aren’t more brands taking advantage?

One could argue, “sure, there’s a market for games, but what can a game really do for our brand? It isn’t selling products. Also, aren’t the app stores flooded with games?”

Consider:

1. The Audi Driving Challenge, a game developed for the iPhone and later for the iPad, has driven more traffic to the Audi website and more real-world test drives than any other digital marketing tactic*.
2. Barclaycard’s Waterslide Game was downloaded 2 million times in its first week of release, and has since been downloaded 17 million times. Version 2 has been downloaded nearly 10 million times. This is from a financial services provider.
3. Cirque du Soleil’s official iPhone app (developed by Upshot) includes a game with an active leader board of tens of thousands of players. (By virtue of being on a leader board suggests players are playing the game more than once in an effort to beat their score and others.) Because the game is only part of the experience, each time it’s played, users are (potentially) exposed to Cirque content.

While a game may only passively be driving brand or product awareness, players have the potential to be exposed to a brand anywhere from a few minutes to hours depending on how much they enjoy the game. If the game is designed to be social (I.E. inviting friends to play) it can go viral.

Also consider that on average, only 25% of a mobile user’s apps are paid for (vs. free downloads). If a brand offers a free game, most consumers aren’t going to make their decision to download based on whether or not it’s branded. The choice becomes simple: it’s free, and it’s fun to play.

Branded games also enjoy the long-tail effect. After a 30-second spot has long faded into the ether, a game can live on for months or even years. Sure, it might not enjoy the popularity of its initial release, but will continue to be downloaded indefinitely, costing the brand nothing to keep it alive in the app store.

Lastly, there’s a reason developers keep cranking out new games: gamers are always on the lookout for the next challenge. Sure, one might get stuck on Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies for longer than they care to admit, but eventually they look for other stuff.

What’s the rule for creating a great branded game? Simple: make it awesome. It’s no secret brands are taking advantage of gaming mechanisms in numerous forms of marketing (highlighted in our 2011 Game On! trend), but I suspect lots of brands tried online games before mobile games rose in popularity, only to conclude, “we tried games, but they didn’t go so well.” Sure, but were they fun? You don’t have push the envelope of 3D graphics for mobile or use cutting edge augmented reality. It simply has to be fun (nice graphics help, but are secondary to game play). Give players that little rush we all get when we get lost in a game—even if that rush only lasts for a minute, and they’ll play it again and again, and tell their friends too. Once your game is awesome, then consider clever ways to push your brand message—unlock product discounts when players reach certain levels, give away virtual representations of your products as achievement badges, or use brand elements as part of the game itself such as locations, characters, products or settings.

Has your brand had success with branded games, mobile or otherwise? Please share your comments.

*Taken from the session, “Behind the Curtain: Secrets of Mobile Application Wizardry” at SXSWi 2011.

• Social validation is the primary motivator on the web. We share on Facebook in order to receive comments and likes. We post to Twitter with the hope of being re-tweeted. We upload to Flickr so our photos will be favorited. Keep this in mind when considering how to motivate consumer behaviors.
• Why does 4chan stimulate such… um… “creative” output? Because there’s no identity and no archive; i.e. it’s anonymous and ephemeral. It’s a survival of the fittest of ideas, where the content is more important to the creator.
• Anonymity can be a powerful stimulus for creativity. The cost of failure is high when it’s tied to your real identity, which impedes risk-taking.
• When selling in boundary-pushing innovations, recognize when the pushback is emotional instead of rational. Data will not overcome emotional doubts.
• The Old Spice Guy’s “Response” campaign is perhaps the greatest digital campaign ever, but the creators don’t see it as an exercise in digital. They describe it as an integrated success story. It worked because the character had been established across a variety of media channels, including good ol’ television.
• Still skeptical about advertising in social games like Farmville? Keep this in mind: the average weekly audience of Farmville is 31 million players. For context, the average weekly audience for American Idol is 26 million viewers. Social games are the new soap operas.
• Did you realize that Hispanic consumers are far more likely to use smartphones than other ethnic groups? In fact, a VP at Nielsen went so far as to say that mobile is the entertainment access point for Hispanic consumers.
• What’s the right equation for generating word-of-mouth? According to General Mills, it’s all about expectations. If you don’t meet them, you generate negative word-of-mouth. If you do meet them, there’s no word-of-mouth. It’s when you exceed expectations that you generate positive word-of-mouth .
• If you trigger the right sequence of “baby steps,” you can generate significant behavioral changes in the long run.
• The challenge for traditional brands in the modern world is that branding has been all about perfection and maintaining control. In today’s world, information is ever changing, consumers are real people rather than idealized targets, and brands are seen as authentic when they’re imperfect.

Mind blown? No problem. We’re pulling together all the pieces from our SXSWrapup tomorrow.

Now there’s a headline that’ll get your attention! But, take it easy – the only naughtiness happening here is allowing so much time to elapse since our last augmented reality roundup! In the meantime, we’ve seen a ton of fantastic marketing examples worth passing along.

As we’ve long asserted, if augmented reality applications are really going to take off for marketers, AR producers will need to increasingly steer clear of the gimmicks and focus on more practical applications. (We’ll make an exception for apps like this Star Wars Falcon Gunner game, since it looks especially fun and it’s such a fantastic example of Life in the OOC.) And when it comes to practicality, we think we’ve found the most useful execution yet in the Word Lens iPhone app. As demonstrated in the video above, the app is remarkably simple to use: point your phone at a sentence and the app will instantly overlay the translated text. Must we point out how useful this app is for our clients in the international travel category? Yo no lo creo. (The fact that it’s currently limited to Spanish-English translation takes nothing away from the fact that this. Is. Friggin’. Amazing.)

Since we’re not going to find a better example of the practical side of AR, let’s at least consider how the more entertaining implementations can be used in clever ways; for instance, shocking people into paying attention to a social cause. The Russian wing of WWF (the one that saves animals, not the one that features grappling beasts in speedos) wanted to raise awareness about the poaching of Siberian Tigers, and felt the most effective approach was to get everyday Russians to experience the sensation of being hunted. Thankfully, no one took this creative brief literally, and instead settled on a widely dispersed tiger t-shirt that featured an augmented reality marker. When unsuspecting shoppers tried on the t-shirts in front of AR-equipped dressing room mirrors, the tag would trigger the sound of gunshots and the appearance of bloody bullet holes on the victim. See the video above for how it – hey, wait a minute… did I catch the Bulls’ starting lineup music in that campaign video??? Unfortunately, I didn’t see any Derrick Rose cameos in there.

Now, we’re not trying to be cranks who decree that all AR efforts have to be hugely helpful or socially responsible. We’re saying that if you do go down the purely-entertaining AR route, just be cognizant about the high level of clutter in this space. You’re going to need a pretty compelling campaign in order to stick out… and being hilarious is one way to do it. Cue the “In Bed” Tagger from Sealy Mattresses, shown in the video above. The app takes the old fortune cookie joke and lets you append the phrase “in bed” to any phrase you can capture in your viewfinder (ok, how did no other mattress maker jump on that joke before?). Of course, users can instantly upload their clever compositions to Facebook, where their friends can marvel at their brilliant achievements… in bed.

Thanks to Celeste Payne for tips on the WWF and Sealy campaigns!

Nonetheless, Visa’s already pitting the two fanbases against each other on Twitter, sponsoring a site that aggregates tweets about the game. The site displays this data in a variety of formats, letting visitors filter the information by hot trending topics, geographic location, or which fan base is most actively tweeting (as shown in the image above – pick up the slack, Steeler nation). Wisely, Visa’s not sitting back and praying for a viral hit – they’re fueling the feuds with a series of trivia questions (hey, look, the Bears made that), contentious debates, and… well, mustache showdowns. On top of that, they’re featuring tweets from NFL players, sports media, and more in the sidebar. That’s a whole lot of content managed neatly in a single spot, which’ll become even more handy as the game progresses on Sunday. In other words, its a run right up the middle for our Driven by Data trend. If you can curate an enormous amount of data and present it in an organized (and visually compelling) manner, the numbers are bound to be on your side.

Visa isn’t the only big-name brand turning to Twitter in their Super Bowl buildup. If you ever needed proof that social media’s gaining legitimacy, mentioning that Mercedes-friggin’-Benz is running a promotion called The Tweet Race should do the trick. For the past week, they’ve had four teams across the country virtually making their way to Dallas fueled by the tweets of their fans. Observers can tweet about their favorite team (or retweet that team’s announcements) to help push the virtual cars towards Dallas, while a series of challenges give each team a chance to gain extra ground. (The teams are getting some help from Twitter-savvy celebrity “coaches” like Serena Williams and Pete Wentz.) The first team to make it to Dallas wins four distinctly non-virtual C-Class coupes. We ran a quick Radian6 search and found that the contest has generated over 12,500 tweets already.

While this is definitely a fun example of our Game On! trend, it’s not too far removed from the Uniqlo Lucky Counter campaign that we’ve previously raved about. But, there’s something else about the Mercedes campaign that really caught our eye. Considering the mechanics underpinning the race, Mercedes needed to ensure that they were getting participants who weren’t just savvy with social media; rather, these folks needed to be influential. So, Mercedes considered the Klout scores of each applicant, which measure the true reach of a given tweeter. (Hint: it’s more than just number of followers. Instead, how often do people retweet the things you’re sharing?) Our War on Whiners trend argued that marketers in 2011 would get smarter about who really matters on social networks, and this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that when Mercedes throws their hat into the social media ring, they do it in the smartest way possible.

[By the way, for everyone on foursquare, be sure to check-in to the "promoted Superbowl venue" and get your badge. Oh, don't worry, we'll get to that little bombshell in a subsequent post.]

Well, this kind of blows my old Super Nintendo soccer game out of the water.

Check out the trailer above for I AM PLAYR, a game that’s currently in development, but slated for a beta release this year.

There’s a lot happening here, but we’ll try to give you the gist. The game is a first person narrative of a football player (the soccer kind) who’s just getting started, and has to face numerous challenges on and off the field. While you develop your skill set and compete in matches, you’re also tasked with managing your teammates, your social life, and… well… your more “intimate” fans.

While that’s certainly an interesting storyline, it’s also only the first chapter. As players navigate their character through the game, they compete against a global audience of other players to see who can develop the top-ranked star. Moreover, the game takes a page from alternate-reality gaming (you remember our coverage of ARGs, right?) and lets the elements of the game seep into the player’s everyday lives. Characters from the game communicate with the player by text and video, radio broadcasts cover the happenings from around the league, and even the tabloids are (reportedly) willing to dedicate headlines to the events that transpire within the game.

Admit it. You’re impressed.

While we could keep raving about how cool this will be, we do need to bring this back to marketing, right? Easy enough. It’s not especially surprising to see Nike jump all over this opportunity, snagging a principal sponsorship that will see them integrated into the storyline and game experience. And, while the game itself is free to play, players will have numerous opportunities to purchase (branded) virtual products that will improve their performance. (Considering the nightlife angle, it will be interesting to see just how risque those partnerships get.)

But, even if this particular game isn’t an appropriate fit for your brand, there are many lessons to be learned from this ambitious project. While there’s a literal connection to our Game On! trend, the more compelling angle is seeing how the creators have brought Life in the OOC to life. Thanks to the game’s multi-platform media integration, and the fact that competitions on the virtual field feed into the leaderboard against other human competitors, there is no clear line where the game ends and the player’s “real life” begins. Even though your average marketing campaign isn’t quite this fun (okay, it’s a LOT less fun), it should still be this seamlessly integrated across a variety of touchpoints. Notice that the creators aren’t hand-wringing over whether they need a mobile strategy or an above-the-line component or an online element. Instead, they’re pulling together an arsenal (yeah, pun intended) of high-tech and low-tech touchpoints to communicate a common story, and letting the players (i.e. the consumers) decide which formats work best for themselves.

I AM PLAYR, I am impressed. (For anyone who wants to read more, head this way.)

D’oh! Apologies for the lag on updates over the past couple of days. We’re in the trenches with our 2011 trends in preparation for some client presentations, so we’re admittedly a bit short on time.

So, it’s only appropriate that we offer you a video from a couple of guys with plenty of time on their hands. It’s a stop-motion clip created with little more than a black sheet, a pile of coins, and a healthy nostalgia for old video games. (Okay, that’s not exactly true – watch ’til the end to see their technique.)

Enjoy the diversion, and we’ll be back shortly with our regularly scheduled awesomeness.

• The launch of our Upshot Smartshot series of 15 minute webinars has been a huge success so far. You can see the past webinars right here, or head right to the most popular Smartshot to date: our take on QR Codes.
• We had LOTS to say after attending the SXSW Interactive conference, and tried to roundup all the posts in a recap right here. Funny how many of those March predictions came true by December, ain’t it? Don’t worry, we’re heading back to Austin in 2011, and we’re planning on being just as detailed in our coverage. How we manage to do that while still partaking in the SXSW party scene is one of the world’s great mysteries.
• You love projection. We love projection. When we wrote about projection, you loved it. The best branded projection from 2010 had to be Samsung’s projection-meets-Youtube-takeover-meets-casual-game, but we also feel like Prague’s 600th anniversary projected masterpiece deserved one more plug.
• As we’ve said many, many times, ignore the gimmicky implementations of augmented reality and focus on the good stuff. You listened, and especially liked our post on invisible pop-ups and augmented reality windows.
• People just liked watching this video from Google’s Chrome browser. Can’t say we blame ‘em. And people just loved the idea behind Uniqlo’s tweet-dependent sale. Can’t find any faults there either.

Part 3 (the last part) is available here. Then we head out for the holidays. Hopefully you’re not far behind.