Play Detective or Flaunt Your Ride with Pod Design Campaigns
But for the second of its many recent marketing initiatives, Pod is shifting its focus back to the grownups with its microsite/banner blitz for A&E’s new Crime & Investigation (CI) Network. With virtually every major TV network dishing out handfuls of CSI-style shows, A&E had the good sense to take this hugely popular genre overseas.
For the UK-based CI Network, which will bow near mid-July, Pod initiated a brilliant, highly interactive portal, which ties directly into the TV programming itself. “For the launch, we’ve worked with A&E and a production company in the UK called Brothers and Sisters,” Curran explains. “We’ve fashioned a series of on-air spots that are going to play one spot a week during the course of a week. The spot contains some intro setups for this mystery, and it will then direct you online to get deeper involved with the mystery through this game experience that we built.”
Through virtually every page, the site is rendered in a grey-hued, hi-tech backdrop—taking cues from today’s crime dramas to create a near-perfect online visual representation. With just the slight move of a mouse, the front page of crackthecase.co.uk features a hi-speed slideshow of clickable menus—from Victim to Witnesses to Autopsy—with evidence planted in almost every landing page to help you solve each week’s CI mystery.
The Autopsy page (above), for example, allows you to move an array of appendages on a 3D model with your mouse, and dig up evidence by clicking on hands, legs, and even nose. “You go in and you get to conduct kind of a mini-autopsy—not in a morbid way,” Curran emphasizes. “You get to examine the crime scene evidence. You find evidence and take it to a research lab, and conduct further examinations. It’s not a deep, gory experience, but a visual inspection where you find the evidence that might’ve been missed the first time.”
Banner ads with click-throughs to Crackthecase.co.uk have been placed on each of the sites within the network of AETV (the umbrella name for A&E) brands, from Biography to the History Channel. Curran says that this marketing push marks a first for A&E. “This is the first time that A&E has done something like this, where there’s information in the promotional segments that ties in with the campaign online.
He adds, “There are a bunch of experiences like this that you can see where we’re trying to push the use of some interesting technologies inside of Flash 8 to make it richer. On-air spots will also change once a week and the experience will get deeper and deeper.”
We’re looking forward to it.
Crack the case for yourself at crackthecase.co.uk
Pimp your social networking skills at http://www.tweetermobile.com
Reader Comments.
- Pingback from Online Investigations »
- Pingback from Online Investigations »
Leave a Comment
Pages: « previous page 1 2
Article Sponsor
More Features
Spotlight
Trust Me – I’m a Professional … SEOADOTAS — At WebMetro we typically provide SEO Action Plans as part of campaigns. As the name implies, an SEO [...] more...
Features
- Automakers Need to Become Better Conversationalists July 2nd 2009
- Affiliates can win in the media buy game July 2nd 2009
- Crowd-Sourced Ads: A Measured Response June 28th 2009
- Is the government coming for you? June 28th 2009
- Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It June 25th 2009
-
Loading ...
Latest News
- Readers weigh in on ATT, ad networks and the iPhone July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that [...] more »
- Hiring, promotions, location, partnerships and product news July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — Internet Oldtimers Foundation, Jumptap, eXelate, Kampyle, The Digital [...] more »
- OPA large ad units unfurl across the web July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The Online Publishers Association said a group of [...] more »
- Email spam in June worst since 2007 July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — MessageLabs Intelligence released its numbers for June, and [...] more »
- Joost becomes YouTube roadkill, starts layoffs July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — Despite reworking its technology to work in a [...] more »
- Ad networks, not websites, choked on Michael Jackson news July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The news of the pop star’s death saw [...] more »
- StrongMail doubling down on social media, buys PopularMedia July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — StrongMail has announced that it acquired PopularMedia, a [...] more »
Reader Favorites
Layoff Tracker
- AOL - 700
- Apple - 50
- Clear Channel - 2,800 total (1,000 currently)
- Google - 340
- IBM - more than 7,800
- Joost - about 90
- MySpace - in June, about 720
- World Avenue - 30 percent of workforce
- Yahoo - 2,220 total, about 700 currently
- Zango - closes, about 90, in addition to earlier layoffs
Classifieds
Recent Comments
- Josette Davids: Great article and an amazing time was had by all at this event. I'm an
- Mike Poserina: There is also a tragic flaw rumored in Bing's ad placement engine. When resolved,
- Andy: Erin, Never mind the commenters who can only see the negative side of things. I thank you
- pkohler: We've also noticed that ads frequently adversely affects the performance of a Web page. As
