The percentage of men involved in some form of online fantasy sports is rapidly rising. Whether it’s the NBA, NFL or MLB, 18-34 males and beyond are savoring the ability to live vicariously through their favorite players while engaging in virtual competition in the process.

One of the upstart companies to capitalize on this popular medium is ProTrade, a relatively new sports “stock market” site that lets users buy and sell to establish a predictive market of athletes. Assembled by a team of MIT statisticians, economists and leading sports figures to develop, this patent-pending valuation engine quantifies on-field performance and assesses an athlete’s contribution to winning.

“You essentially are creating a stock market portfolio based on athletes you think are undervalued,” explains Steve Curran, creative director of Pod Design, the agency responsible for ProTrade’s latest branding effort. “It creates a market system that they then in turn award cash and prizes and builds a social networking community around a sports stock market. It’s similar to the Hollywood stock exchange, the way that created a really vibrant dynamic and a market for people to create a virtual portfolio of celebrities they’re investing in.” Curran adds, “That draws the attention of people who are inside the industry, and it gives them the beat on what people think and feel about players.”

While the industry gathers their thoughts and analysis on the ProTrade activity, Pod Design is helping the burgeoning company gain brand awareness by launching a viral campaign this week. “What we wanted to do is find the most viral concept we could,” says Curran. “We like to build on games where we can find a unique twist that makes it organic to the service or the product that we’re trying to create viral traffic towards. In this case, we didn’t want to get locked into any particular sport or real-world celebrities because there is obviously the licensing of players, teams or logos. So around the time we were brainstorming ideas, earlier this year, there were a number of articles about mascots behaving badly.”

With the light bulbs flashing, Curran and company devised an advergame, Mascot Kombat, which, as any gaming enthusiast will tell you, draws inspiration from one of the most legendary fighting games ever. “We were playing with this, and came up with the idea of doing a parody of Mortal Kombat,” Curran reveals. “We created a game where you can choose 1 of 4 mascot clichés to play in this fighting game. Similar to the console games, we have special games and attacks for each of the characters. So it’s a good combination of strong game play and humor. We think it will make a good viral because not only is it a good game to play, but it also has a sense of humor, the kind of things guys would send to other guys. It definitely has a point challenge to be particularly competitive.”

While no blood-soaked fatalities are involved, this Kombat game does parallel the inherent competitiveness of sports, and serves as a fun way to kill time during the lull periods of your 9-5. In general, viral campaigns and advergames are nothing new to Pod, which explains Curran’s straightforward approach to creating successful executions in this medium.

“With viral campaigns, the dream is to do one that converts to customers,” he says. “We always try to caution any [client] upfront that conversion off a click of a viral marketing campaign isn’t the most direct path. But we look at this as one of the most cost-effective ways you can turn to achieve one of those exposures. It pre-exposes you to something before you decide to buy it or check it out further. When it exceeds far beyond what you’ve spent in a cost-per-click type situation, it really goes beyond the cost of production, it’s unpaid media. So we push these things hard for a couple of months, but they generally take on a life of their own.”

With Pod’s amusing seeding effort and ProTrade’s PR spin, the site should hopefully see some of those desired traffic spikes in the near future. Curran hopes that Mascot Kombat, though, serves as just a tiny accoutrement to ProTrade’s overall service. “It’s a very sticky concept obviously. It’s something similar to fantasy leagues where you’re going to be checking back in on a daily basis to see how your portfolio is doing based on the real-world performance of your players. Fantasy leagues have proven to be an extremely popular thing to participate in online. It creates so many click-throughs, because people will come back all the time checking in, like day-trading activity.”

Want to indulge your flights of sporting fantasy, play day-trader, and kick butt all in one sitting?

Visit both ProTrade.com and MascotKombat.com.

The first marketing push, for high-end entertainment system retailer Tweeter, emphasizes the company’s recent move into the mobile space. While the traditional realm has been good to Tweeter thanks to the chain’s fat-walleted, mostly adult constituents, Tweeter Mobile is aimed squarely at the kids—kids being the high school to college set that’d much rather show off bumping sound systems in vehicles than flat screens in their living rooms.

Traditionally, Tweeter’s had a really good positioning for the mobile space, too, because of the car installs,” Pod Design creative director Steve Curran tells ADOTAS. “But that business has changed over the last few years. The rise of the regional “Pimp my Ride” stores has cut into the business, where people might perceive they’re going to get more expert service from a local installer than a chain.”

So Pod assuaged Tweeter’s worries with a Flash/HTML hybrid site that is both enticing and educational for the 14-and-up audience. “It was a little bit of a brand challenge for [Tweeter], it’s a very different culture and they’re talking to–this audience that starts dreaming about the $10,000 stereo system they’re putting in the $10,000 car. They start dreaming about this at the age of 14 or 15. It’s a very specific window that you’re appealing to, this audience that they have nothing to spend their money on except this kind of stuff. They don’t have to worry about having a family or buying a house.”

While Pod installed the standard set of branded goodies, including wallpapers and music downloads, the agency upped the ante by offering both a downloadable videogame called “Drive” (functional for both PC and MAC), and a personal audio installation tech named Johnny (who, by the way, isn’t an actor, but a real Tweeter employee).

“With Johnny, it’s much more personalized,” Curran says about Tweeter’s unofficial mascot. “People can ask Johnny technical questions about their products or installs. Being an installer, he answers those questions in a forum himself.” He continues, “It’s an important thing recognize what the audience wants. They want to know it’s going to be a personal relationship with the installer—this is their baby, this is their car. They don’t want to drive up to a big store and drop their car off and not get a one-on-one relationship.”

All-in-all, the site, which will be an ongoing live experience, and serves as an entertaining platform for those just dying to flaunt their wares—evoking social networking aspects in the process. “What we wanted to do was create a separate identity for them with Tweeter Mobile in the online space where you can build a community,” Curran adds. “It’s having a more direct relationship with that [younger] audience versus the more adult audience. There’s a user gallery where you can submit photographs of the install you’ve had done. That’s very popular with the audience, having 3-D images and specs of their car installs. It’s kind of an ego thing.”

Though they’ve been the bane of every celebrity’s existence, the paparazzi still provides a service to the pop culture/entertainment-obsessed masses that read Star and Us Weekly like they were the New York Times.So as both a nod to these brazen shutterbugs and to promote a new P2P DVD trading site called Peerflix, Boston viral/branded entertainment agency Pod Design has created a new advergame called “Paparazzi: Adventures on the Red Carpet.” Pod Design creative chief Steve Curran tells ADOTAS, “We timed it appropriately for the red carpet season, knowing that there’s a lot of focus and attention on award show nominations, who’s showing up at what party, etc. So there’s a lot of buzz surrounding pop culture and celebrity-stalking.”

The advergame, which initially launched at the beginning of this month, essentially puts the camera in your hand. Your mission as assigned by your cigar-chomping tabloid editor: get snaps of celebs (whose names are subtly changed and faces cleverly manipulated) at various red-carpet events with a mouse over and click. The better the shot(s) of your intended target, the more money you rack up. “The idea towards launching [the game] at the beginning of this year was to kind of [serve] as a review of celebrities that have been in the news, are very topical, and it’s poking fun of them,” Curran explains.

Pod and Peerflix’s target demographic with this campaign — which required zero media spending – has skewed to the youth market of pop culture fans. According to this week’s stats, the send-to-a-friend game’s been a big hit thus far, garnering 800,000 unique visitors and 1,000,000 gamers overall in just a matter of weeks — 43% of that traffic arriving from the send-to-a-friend link. Obviously, it struck a nerve, so it’s been a great viral response for us,” says Curran.

In addition, the site’s been receiving critical reviews and linkage from hot gaming and entertainment sites. “[These are] sites that we know would be interested in [highlighting] that kind of thing for their audience,” Curran adds. “One of the sites that covers games, culture, movies and DVDs — Hecklerspray.com- sent us an email back and said ‘wow, there’s never been a game more perfectly targeted for our audience. So they pumped it up. We also got a lot of traffic from gaming sites like Addictinggames.com, which delivered an enormous amount of traffic for us. So that’s a perfect audience.”

Of course, Curran is not one to forget Peerflix, whose name is not only branded on the Flash-enabled game itself, but whose landing page is easily accessible from the game via click-throughs. “As a result of the campaign, thousands of visitors have clicked through from the game to Peerflix on a daily basis,” he says. The San Francisco-based company, which just received venture capital funding last fall, follows a slightly similar pattern to Netflix, except that it offers an easier way for budget-minded media consumers to build a massive DVD library. “You create an account of all the DVDs have in your inventory, and you create a list of DVDs that you want to have,” Curran explains.

“Their proprietary technology service arranges for those trades. So you can keep your DVD collection in flux. You’ll always be receiving things you want and getting rid of things that you don’t want anymore. So it’s basically a tool to create your dream DVD library and keep it up to date, but in a legal way (laughs).”

Though the advergaming market is just now exploding, Curran’s been a step ahead of the fray, having worked as in product development and branded marketing in the late 80s for videogames like Wheel of Fortune. “That was in the 8-bit Nintendo area (laughs),” he says. “My first job was creating prizes for The Price is Right out of a color palette of like 8 colors. So we’ve always taken that [early] videogame experience and built on that as kind of a hook for marketing and branding.”

The Peerflix promotion, which will run as long as the traffic is there, serves its purpose as both a unique branding effort and an entertaining experience for the red carpet gazer in us all.

And besides, no celebrities were harmed in the making of this game and we didn’t even have to deal with Joan Rivers in the process.

After angst-ridden grunge rock practically eradicated the hair metal movement in the early 90s, we thought we’d seen the last of those frivolous, spandex-clad, Aquanet-abusing shenanigans.

Not so, says The Darkness.

Sure, the genre has been somewhat resurrected (and lampooned) by VH1 specials, but the aforementioned UK act has taken it upon itself to single-handedly awaken the beast, giving nostalgic 80s holdovers something to raise their lighters to while luring a whole new generation of fans to their midst in the process. The band’s glam theatrics and arena rock bombast might seem anachronistic and cheeky, but if interviews and live performances reveal anything, it’s that they’re serious musicians who are also in on the joke.

So to commemorate the release of The Darkness’s second opus, One Way Ticket to Hell and Back, the band’s label, Atlantic/WEA, hired Boston’s Pod Design to devise a viral campaign that would emphasize the band’s fun-loving spirit and wink-wink attitude while cleverly promoting the new record.

Combining their trademark send-to-a-friend applications with advergaming components, Pod (with the help of One Way producer Roy Thomas Baker) created a game — to be launched this week – that certainly fuses the album’s theme with the six-string heroics of the band. Visitors who dare to play will enter a bat-infested, subterranean dungeon where they’re faced with a guitar-wielding demon. To play the game, you’ll have to match the fret-riding Darkness licks that the devilish avatar plays by clicking on a spherically-arranged set of candles on an altar in front of you. Each candle carries a note and must be clicked on in the correct order, or you will be “cast into hell forever!”

Visitors who do succeed in becoming rock gods by advancing through all the levels will be entered into a contest for a chance to win a Darkness prize pack including a Video iPod and an autographed copy of One Way Ticket To Hell…And Back. Two Runner Up Winners will also receive an autographed CD and Darkness Poster.