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Kiran Aditham
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Kiran Aditham is a Business Management grad from the University of Central Florida, Aditham earned his stripes as a freelance writer in music/arts publishing.

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Masterfoods Asks, “What Does Your Inner M Look Like?”

Written on
January 26th 2007
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by Kiran Aditham  |
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What began as a small Internet project early last year, according to Hayne, mushroomed into a full-scale offline/online promotional effort thanks to the suggestions of the higher-ups at Masterfoods. Of course, the ultimate objective for all parties involved is driving traffic to M&M’s virtual world, which is a user-generated smorgasbord. With the Character Creator being the first step, visitors can then steer their chocolate-filled avatar into M&Ms’ version of Disney Land, filled with online arcade games, photo galleries, opportunities to insert their character into amusing short movies of various genres, as well an “E-Depot” that offers downloads of screensavers and e-cards.

While Bayne admits BBDO New York is more steeped in traditional advertising, he does point out that the company’s art direction and creative input with this campaign meshed well with and were fully realized by the Barbarian Group. Regarding the creative process, Bayne says, “They would give us a couple thoughts for the Character Creator in terms of layout and all that. We would make our comments simplified, ‘wish this was here’ or ‘wish this was bigger.’ Again, it was very much collaborated with Barbarian Group on all aspects, except for when they’re actually building.”

For the building itself, Barbarian COO/Co-Founder Rick Webb explains, “Basically, we built the whole front end of the Character Creator—the design, illustration and Flash programming, and all the interaction between the front end and the backend. It was pretty much the whole kitten caboodle on the interactive ad side. It’s obviously part of a larger campaign [BBDO] had thought up already. They had the M&M characters already, and that’s such a huge component of it, so the illustrative style came from all of that. For the ones we made, we wanted it to kind of look like the [ads that were already made]—drawing the buildings, all the 3D renderings of the different body parts and accessories, and the entire interface.”

Of course, as Sim City proved to us long ago, virtual worlds are meant to expand upon, and both BBDO New York and Barbarian Group are on the same page, each dropping hints that there are bigger things to come on this planet “There is so much to offer, and the plan is to keep continuing to build on it and offer more hairstyles, and just keep adding to it,” Bayne reveals. “The thing that’s great about the website is that it’s tough not to be on there for more than 5 minutes. It forces you to really check things out. Down the line, we’re hoping to launch the ‘planet’ side of the website, where you can go into the world and you can walk around. It will actually be more user-generated, because you can actually walk up to other M&M’s and say hi to them or challenge them to a videogame and stuff like that.”

Webb concurs with a knowing chuckle, “There’s definitely more coming. I probably shouldn’t tell you what it is, but it gets more and more awesome.”

So what does your ‘inner M” look like?



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