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Shadowing Interactive Ninjas: Exploring the Makings, Mindset and Marketing Moves of 42entertainment

Written on
October 17th 2006
Author
by Kenneth Musante  |
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Fast forward 3 ½ years, when Weisman contacted Joe DiNunzio, a former Disney Imagineer who was no stranger to new forms of entertainment and marketing. In 1999-2000, DiNunzio, along with film maker Jerry Bruckheimer, Idealab founder Bill Gross, and current Paramount CEO Brad Grey, started a company called Z.com. The trio’s goal was to develop a new organic art form.

And while they shared some successes, including the development of an online community and campaign for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers that touched several million music fans, the lack of broadband infrastructure, and the online social user habits we take for granted today stalled the company until it was eventually abandoned. Through it all, though, DiNunzio held fast to what he had learned as an Imagineer. “The foundation of any good entertainment has to be about engaging and delighting your audience,” he states. “You have to put your head into the mindset of your audience. And that might be a four-year old girl, a 45-year old man, or an 80-year old grandfather.” In other words, it’s not about what you delight in; it’s about what they delight in.

It finally all clicked for Weisman and DiNunzio when they founded 42entertainment in 2003, during which time the pair lured several creative colleagues, including Stewart and Elan Lee. Though they were now separate from Microsoft, Redmond was still a near & dear business connection. In 2004, the newly developed 42 stretched its creative limbs with what has become one of the definitive examples of alternate reality gaming and interactive marketing in our era. Microsoft Game Studios needed something big to turn the highly anticipated sequel to Halo from a good FPS game into a cultural phenomenon—hence the development of ilovebees.

In 2004, around the time of Halo 2’s announcement, several individuals received jars of honey in the mail that also contained a scrambled message that, when decoded, read “I Love Bees.”

Meanwhile, several movie theater trailers for Halo 2 displayed the URL “ilovebees.com” for a split second, a nice take on subliminal advertising. Visitors to the site meanwhile saw what appeared to be a website about beekeeping that eventually became corrupted with strings of static and random characters. The heart of ilovebees was a radio drama broken up into 30-second segments. As players uncovered new clues to the story, which detailed the crash of a military space ship from the year 2552, the game distributed audio clips to different pay phones around the U.S., which players had to find to discover more of the story.

It’s “emotional investment” pushes like these that 42 has built its entire business model on. For DiNunzio & company, it’s quality over quantity, not about getting the lowest ROI. “I think that if you can create a positive experience that the audience wants to pull into their lives, they make the decision to not only consume the entertainment but to interact with it,” he says. “Once you’ve overcome that, you’ve got an emotional investment in what you’re doing.”

In a more recent campaign for Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the 42 team wanted to create a positive association between the Pirates story and the messaging application. First participants signed on as a member of the crew of the Black Pearl, the pirate ship featured in the movie. Inside Windows Live Messenger, the players interacted with Billy Bones, a chat bot that emulated one of the characters in the movie. Billy gave players different challenges, the successful completion of which gave them a glimpse into the storyline of the upcoming movie.

The game’s interactive puzzles started out as a single player experience. But as players went deeper into it, they needed to bring in a partner. That strategy allowed 42 to draw in players that might ordinarily choose not to get entangled in a complex social game. And while the campaign did not generate a massive number of impressions, and contained no hard sell message, the average impression lasted 35 minutes. During that time, players interacted with every feature of Windows Live Messenger, had a first-hand experience with the storyline of Pirates, and shared that experience with a friend.



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