Solution Type: Digital Promotion

Technology: Affinitive’s Facebook Sweepstakes Application

Summary

Your Shape Fitness Evolved (YSFE) sought to target gamers who are passionate about health and enjoy getting fit with video games.  As one of the first games to use Microsoft Kinect, YSFE had the challenge of conveying the efficacy and fun of the game as well as the Kinect device on a limited budget. The campaign goal was to create buzz and excitement for the game within social media channels in advance of the game’s release in November 2010.

The ‘Boot Camp’ Facebook Contest campaign launched in October asking influential gamers to submit audition videos to explain why they needed a fitness makeover. Five winners were flown to San Francisco to play the game before the public and give their opinions and feedback.

Ubisoft uploaded images, video and blog entries in real time during the 2 day “Boot Camp’ event, adding excitement and intrigue for fans. Influencers uploaded their own content after the event and inspired hundreds of gamers to create their own diaries.

Results

• 17X Increase in Facebook Likes in 8 Weeks
• 5,000,000+ Impressions (Xbox, Facebook, Twitter)
• 130 photos & videos submitted
• 50,000+ YouTube Views

Winner 2011 MI6 Game Marketing Awards – Most Effective Viral Marketing

Video Entries By ‘Boot Camp’ Contestants

Hamza Aziz (Destructoid.com)

Rande Gabriel

Rachel Davis

Jeremy Yarbrough

As Facebook puts it:

What separates a PDC from most other development firms is the ability to understand social mechanics and technical possibilities on Platform.

Affinitive was chosen in recognition of our innovative Facebook Platform solutions ranging from Facebook applications and platform integrations, to brand social management, to social sweepstakes and loyalty/CRM integration.

We look forward to continuing to deliver innovative social experiences for our clients and their customers on Facebook Platform!

JCPenney recently launched an app on Facebook called Dorm Life. It’s targeted to college freshmen, and although this is a major portion of Facebook’s demographic and the app is well executed, it doesn’t seem to be doing well. It allows users to put pictures of JCPenney products on their profiles and suffers from what can be called the “free ad” mentality. Unfortunately, people will not flock to put something on their profiles just because YOU care about it. People will put something on their profile because it provides value to THEM.

Flirting is definitely something of value to the Facebook demographic, and an app for Calvin Klein call In2U would seem have tapped this perfectly in allowing users to anonymously flirt with each other. However, a basic premise alone is not enough; the details of the execution always matter and this app is clumsily made. Despite all the communication channels available through the Facebook API, there is an awkward requirement to know a friend’s external email in order to flirt with them and for them to notice a strange generic email received amongst all the other spam as something intriguing to act upon. Thus, any viral growth from friend to friend is severly hindered.

At least these apps tried to create something specifically tailored to the social networking environment. More often than not, the expedient course is to take the “round peg in square hole” approach and repackage pre-existing content from something completely unrelated into something vaguely resembling an application. This is what ABC did by taking widgets for its popular shows like Ugly Betty and allowing people to put them on their profiles. They are just pushed content and contain nothing in them that makes social media powerful. No personalization, no communication with friends, no user generated content, no interaction between people at all.

One can only imagine all the conference calls and PowerPoint presentations that went into creating these apps. It’s a shame that so much money and the time of so many otherwise talented and intelligent people could be spent on creating products so boring and useless. Unfortunately, this seems to be the norm in corporate America. Occasionally, however, a gem manages to make its way through the maze of cubicles and quarterly reports.

This is the case with an application called Parking Wars, which was created for an A&E show of the same name. Rather than taking the obvious route of aggregating clips and news from the show into something that no one would care about, they instead produced a thematically related game in which people park cars on each others’ profiles. It utilizes many of the hooks provided by Facebook to create an engaging social activity that allows people to have fun with their friends. Oh, and the show probably got a lot of promotion from it too.