In an effort to reach out to those who are new to the Kingdom Hearts franchise before the impending release of Kingdom Hearts 1.5, Square Enix has released a new trailer entitled Introduction to Kingdom Hearts. The trailer showcases the many characters and concepts used in the series, as well as some of the familiar Disney environments used.
This is part one of a two-part article (read part two here) taking a closer look at themes that emerged from the convergence of various digital, social and integrated consumer engagements core to the campaign for the launch of the Man of Steel. Jump to part two here.
In July 2013, Warner Brothers celebrated the 75th anniversary of the return of an iconic hero to the big screen. The studio managed to forge a distinct bond with a massive core audience of fans eager to see the man in the red cape fly again.
An alien from the planet Krypton and in 2013 a stranger in a stranger land, Man of Steel’s Superman is a personal story of what it means to be the one chosen to protect Earth and the hard choices that must be made. With over 100 global promotional partners and $160 million in collective promotional support, the Man of Steel campaign virtually touched all walks of life with tie-ins from everything from eyewear and cell phones to the National Guard and Carl’s Jr. Super Bacon Cheeseburger.
In each execution, Warner Brothers utilized best-in-class viral, influencer and direct marketing tactics to empower fans to celebrate a new telling of the familiar tale and how this Kryptonian keeps us feeling grounded here on Planet Earth.
To create a sense of otherworldly suspense, the Man of Steel campaign began with a teaser trailer featuring the voice of Michael Shannon as General Zod informing the people of Earth about his hunt for Kal-El, a lost son of Krypton. The words “You Are Not Alone” flashed in different languages during the trailer and helped to established a global tone for this creepy video.
On a companion site called the DSRW Project (Deep Space Radio Wave Project), fans were given the tools to decipher intercepted Kryptonian audio transmissions and share with their friends.
As each new cipher was released, fans could analyze the signal of incoming audio by selecting boxes in a row that corresponded to the waveform audio as it was played. Each match would reveal an ‘on’ frequency state on a grid and reveal part of the glyph.
Both individual and community progress was tracked as fans worked to break the code. Users could sync to community progress to get up to speed quickly and try and decode the transmissions.
Residents of Los Angeles started posting pictures to social networks featuring a billboard with a distorted image of the Superman emblem and a series of Kryptonian symbols.
Once decoded, the symbols revealed an IP address of “168.161.242.137” which led to a destination URL at IWillFindHim.com. On the site, a Kryptonian countdown clock counted down to the release of the next trailer.
By featuring the voice of the primary villain in the trailer, Man of Steel created an aura of otherworldly exclusivity that drove fans to feel a sense of urgency around the campaign. Utilizing a tone familiar to sci-fi audiences that know we are not alone in the universe, core fans were thrilled to know that the film would depict more of Superman’s alien origins as they got reacquainted with Zod. This set the tempo in the drive toward launch as new footage became available with each new exclusive partnership and trailer release.
No other hero can spark a debate about the superiority of their strength and power quicker than Superman. To get fans excited and give them a taste of his power, the campaign put some of the raw power of Krypton in the hands of consumers and gave them a chance to fly around Metropolis and see what kind of punch the son of Jor-El would be packing in Man of Steel.
The browser based game Hero’s Flight, launched in a partnership with Norton, let players control Superman and choose whether to save or destroy Metropolis.
In this simple flying game, players can use Superman to blast through buildings and rocks, discover power-ups and use his x-ray or heat vision to try and survive. By logging into Facebook, players can challenge their friends to see who can complete each level the fastest.
A different browser game, Metropolis Mayhem let players dive into some 2-D side scrolling action and try and tear up the skies above Metropolis. Using their keyboard to maneuver the Man of Steel around obstacles and destroy objects with heat-vision, players must collect Superman logos to increase their score while dodging floating laser beams, plasma weapons from dropships and guided rockets shot from helicopters.
On the official Norton Facebook page, a dedicated app asked fans to enter a sweepstakes for a chance to win $10,000 or movie tickets, and check out exclusive clips from Man of Steel.
A series of exclusive featurettes from the film (Strength, Flight and Speed) were embedded from the official Norton YouTube channel and unlocked within the app.
Earlier this summer, WB Games had released the hit console game Injustice: Gods Among Us for consoles. The game featured DC Comics superheroes including Superman, but wasn’t connected to Man of Steel so as part of the final DLC pack, a connection was made for fans. General Zod became an official playable DLC character.
Zod’s in-game powers were similar to Superman’s, but additionally he wielded an energy blaster that could hit enemies from a distance. He could also summon a minion to chomp on his opponent.
Additionally, the official suit from Man of Steel was included as featured DLC content in Injustice: Gods: Among Us.
On iOS and Android, the official Man of Steel app let players replay events from the film and try and stop General Zod’s invasion of Earth. By attacking, dodging, blocking and utilizing various superpowers including flight, super speed, and heat vision, players could use gesture based combat and try to defeat Zod.
Microtransactions allowed fans to unlock and purchase up to six different suits from the film to become a truly unstoppable force. Customizable abilities let players embrace the true strength of Superman with bone-crunching combos, all with the swipe of a finger.
Lastly, proving that anything can be recreated in Minecraft, in a partnership with Machinima, the “Ideal of Hope” trailer was brought to life.
Some men want to watch the world burn, others want to use their heat vision and blast and soar high above the streets of Metropolis. Nothing can satisfy an audience more completely than putting them in the shoes of a hero and letting them throw a punch. Man of Steel created multiple games across multiple platforms that let fans choose when and where they wanted to be Superman. Fans that wanted to know how hard hitting this new Superman would be got a chance to find out and learn more about the story in the process. On desktop, mobile and tablet fans got to be Superman just by clicking or installing an app knowing they would be rewarded with exclusive content or high cash prizes. Man of Steel also embraced the most populous video game platform today and partnered with the right influencers to bring Superman to completely uncharted land: Minecraft.
Note: Campaign results and performance are not included as they have not been made publicly available. Each tactic highlighted in this series of articles is chosen for being strategically innovative in creating value through social and earned media.
About the Author
Steven J. Knezevich is a Senior Digital Strategist at the Ayzenberg Group working with the creative, social and digital departments to drive innovation in user engagement and new media storytelling across connected campaigns. He is a brand strategist with 12+ years of experience in the video game and entertainment sector driving business growth, launching brands and products and maximizing accountability through creative, technology-forward marketing.
Analyst firm eMarketer has found that while Google continues to dominate the online ad market, Facebook is on the rise. The firm found Facebook taking home 6.5 percent of all online advertising dollars spent in the U.S. this year, up by an impressive 0.6 percent since last year. Facebook’s ad revenue is estimated at $1.5 billion per quarter, making ads the source the majority of the revenue the social network pulls in.
eMarketer also found that a fair portion of Facebook’s ad sales is derived from other web companies such as Fab.com, EA, Zynga, and Groupon. However, taking the cake for the most money spent on Facebook ads are financial services companies, led by American Express.
It’s no secret that both Facebook and advertisers in general are looking to mobile as a potentially lucrative growth platform. For Facebook, its focus on mobile goes beyond its current userbase. In its latest earnings report, Facebook revealed it had a total of 189 million monthly active users (MAU) who accessed the social site solely through mobile apps or Facebook’s mobile website. Yet the company has said it intends to use mobile to reach the next billion Facebook users in less developed areas of Asia, Africa, India, and South America, where smartphones penetration is outpacing other computing devices.
“We want to give everyone in the world the power to share,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the company’s quarterly earnings phone call. “The big question for us is, which areas are growing the fastest Whatever the form factor is going forward, we’ll be able to deliver.”
“We’ve sent a team of people around the world to see what they use, and we care about everybody, not just you guys,” Facebook’s director of product Peter Deng said to in a recent conference with press and analysts.
Speaking at the same event, Facebook engineering director Doug Purdy said, “Facebook really represents an opportunity to connect over 900 million people, but we hope one day for it to be the entire world.”
According to a new study commissioned by Janrain, Google+ is now a commanding presence in social when it comes to website sharing and social log-ins. While Facebook is still the leader in social log-ins with 46 percent of traffic, Google+ is catching up quickly with 34 percent of log-ins now using Google+. The next largest players in terms of social log-ins trail well behind, with Yahoo responsible for seven percent of traffic, and Twitter next at six percent.
Google+ currently has more than 500 million registered users and 343 million active users, according to an independent study by GlobalWebIndex. Facebook still leads Google+ in users, but although both are seeing growth Google is growing at a much faster pace. Shares, or in Google’s case +1s, are also growing faster for Google, at a pace of 19 percent per month for Google+ compared to 10 percent for Facebook). Searchmetrics has estimated that by the year 2016, users will be sharing more often on Google+ than Facebook — almost 1.1 trillion +1’s per month compared to 849 billion shares on Facebook.
Source: VentureBeat
The prospect of launch console shortages is rearing its head. Due to volume of demand for PlayStation 4, GameStop has been forced to halt taking pre-orders and start putting people on wait lists.
GameStop claims that all of the systems they had allocated for sale at launch are now accounted for. Customers that remain interested in pre-ordering the system can still find it available at other retailers, and they can also sign up for a notification list that will let users know if more consoles are available.
GameStop isn’t the first retailer to run out of pre-orders for the PS4. Toys R Us has already run out of launch systems and shut down pre-orders. Other retailers such as Best Buy are still offering the systems, though Amazon is only promising delivery of PS4 systems at launch if customers buy a game for the PS4 in addition to the console.
As for the competition, according to IGN, Best Buy is no longer accepting pre-orders for Xbox One (the product page says ‘sold out online’). For now, the Xbox One is still available for pre-order on Amazon as well as Wal-Mart, Target and GameStop.
Source: GI.biz
The majority of iOS apps are rarely downloaded “zombies” that never show up in Apple’s app usage charts, according to data provided to the BBC by research firm Adeven. Apple frequently publishes extensive lists of apps by category, price and other factors for all of its major territories. Adeven says more than a third of the nearly 900,000 apps in the App Store never show up on Apple’s charts.
“We call the apps that hold no position anywhere in the world zombies because they do not generate a significant amount of downloads to sustain their further development,” Paul Muller from Adeven told BBC News.
According to the firm, “579,001 apps out of a total of 888,856 apps in our database are zombies.”
Apple has a different assessment. It says 90 percent of iOS apps are active when looked at monthly, meaning they’re downloaded at least once per month. Adeven doesn’t disagree but says that level of activity doesn’t amount to anything for the developer.
Adeven’s Muller put it this way, “They may still receive a couple of downloads every day – maybe even up to 100 or so – but that is not going to be enough for a developer to capitalize on or draw motivation from to support the app.”
The timing of Adeven’s data is noteworthy. It raises questions about app quality and clutter in the App Store as Apple celebrates its app marketplace’s fifth anniversary. Apple marked the milestone earlier this week by offering five popular paid apps for free and releasing impressive factoids. The company says the App Store has seen 50 billion downloads since launch, and paid around $10 billion to developers. Apple boasts the sum eclipses what all other app marketplaces combined have invested in developers.
Meantime, developers have grown increasingly vocal about the difficulty of getting new products noticed in the App Store. They cite factors such as little-to-no marketing support, including a storefront with no mechanism for featuring apps outside of Apple’s charts. Discoverability amidst the store’s growing clutter has also become a sticking point, compounded by Apple’s continued approval of me-too apps that launch quickly to mimic popular products, sometimes only in name. In a surprising move, Pocket Gamer recently reported that Apple has begun cracking down on apps designed to help with discoverability, restricting software that aggregates user recommendations or filters app searches.
Apple launched the App Store in 2008 with about 500 apps, and a reluctant Steve Jobs at the helm. As Jobs’ biography later revealed, his vision for the App Store was to create a marketplace for Apple software, not third-party developed apps.
Source: BBC News
Murdered: Soul Suspect was one of the more interesting games to be shown at E3. Players take the role of a recently deceased detective who uses new-found ghostly abilities to solve his own murder. By investigating crime scenes and possessing witnesses, players will piece together the mystery of their own demise.
Two of the most beloved RPGs to come out of the PlayStation 2 era were Final Fantasy X and X-2. Final Fantasy X in particular set a standard for JRPGs through its graphics, gameplay and compelling story. Now, both games are getting a second life in a new HD remaster on the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita.
The games will see a re-release this fall, and will no doubt bring back some nostalgia for the PS2 generation.
Tony KeyThe Ubisoft booth at E3 was crowded with attendees, and the noise level was high as software and demos were all around. We went behind the scenes at the Ubisoft booth to sit down with Ubisoft’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, Tony Key. He provided some insight into how Ubisoft plans to deal with new consoles, new IP, new sequels, and a very busy holiday season ahead.
Your CEO Yves Guillemot told me that Ubisoft will be increasing its marketing spend this year. What’s driving that?
By increasing our marketing, our goal is actually to lower our risk. We spend so much time, energy and money creating these experiences like Watch_Dogs and Assassin’s Creed, you need to match that now on the marketing side. You’re making a huge bet on the development side, you’ve got to be all in. It became very clear to us about two years ago that this is a blockbuster world we live in now. That means we have to be able to match the resources our production teams are putting in on the marketing side. You saw that with Assassin’s Creed III, that was our largest marketing campaign ever as a company. What’s interesting now is it doesn’t feel so big any more. This year we’re looking at Assassin’s Creed IV, and Watch_Dogs, and saying ‘That’s what it takes nowadays, that’s what we’re going to keep doing.’
Is the budget for Assassin’s Creed IV bigger than the budget for Assassin’s Creed III?
It’s not bigger, but it’s probably smarter. I think we’ll get more. With Assassin’s Creed III, that was the first time we really tried to go to the next level on the marketing. You’re talking double what we’ve ever spent before on marketing. When you suddenly double your marketing budget, you end up learning a lot of things about what works and what doesn’t work. We’re making smarter choices this year based on the experience. Each year we’re going to get smarter about that. We’ll get 20 percent more effectiveness out of the Assassin’s Creed IV money just because we’ve learned so much.
How is the marketing mix changing for Ubisoft?
The world seems to be moving towards these personalized experiences. That’s why open-world gaming is one of the big must-haves for this next generation. People want to have their personal experience when they’re playing the game, so it’s the same in marketing. We want to try and create marketing content that allows people to customize how they receive it, how they consume it. It’s so much broader now, we’re all learning so much more every day about how we can utilize social media successfully. Assassin’s Creed has 4 to 5 million people in their Facebook community right now, so for us it’s how do you leverage that How do we leverage our hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, how do we leverage the fact that we’re getting 50 million views on YouTube of Assassin videos Those are things that just a few years ago we didn’t even have access to, but they do take resources. As much as everyone likes to thing they’re completely additional, they still cost money.
Our media mix has evolved over time. TV plays a different role than it did five years ago, but our research shows that it still matters. We have a lot more opportunities in the digital space. What we like about the digital and social space is the ability to measure the effectiveness of what we’re doing. But just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you have the ability to measure it in-house. You have to develop those tools, you have to develop that experience, you have to manage those big data questions, which data matters, which data doesn’t matter and what is it really telling me That’s many jobs at a company like ours now, and I actually have a hard time finding people to do it.
It’s a relatively new skill set to analyze that data and make it actionable for the marketing team. For us, that’s the next frontier. We thought we had business intelligence, and every day we find out how much less we have than what we want. The more we learn, the more we realize there’s so much more that we can do to understand what our customer wants, how they want to consume our content, which vehicles are effective and which are not. I spend a lot of my time doing that.
Watch_Dogs is a new IP without the years of audience building that Assassin’s Creed has. How does that alter the marketing challenge?
That’s part of the reason why it’s so hard to bust out a new IP. There’s no proven DNA for people to latch onto for people to say ‘I understand what that brand is about.’ Especially when you’re annualizing something like Just Dance or an Assassin’s Creed, you understand that experience and you either want to be part of that community or you don’t. We can tap into that and get a faster start. With Assassin’s Creed IV, we start with those 4 million users on our Facebook page. With Watch_Dogs, we’re in acquisition mode — we’re trying to find people who are intrigued by the concept of what Watch_Dogs is all about, about the surveillance and the hacking. It’s a whole different strategy in the social space — we’re trying to acquire people, where with Assassin’s Creed we’re trying to get more engagement.
We’re rolling the boulder up the hill, and eventually you get to the top and you have that momentum. Even with all the great press and all that excitement around Watch_Dogs, there’s still less awareness outside of the core gaming community than we need to have when we finally launch that game. Because now we’re in blockbuster world, and Watch_Dogs needs to be a blockbuster because it deserves to be and as a company that’s what we need it to be. It’s the most ambitious production in the history of Ubisoft, and we need to make sure that everybody who likes videogames has a chance to decide that this game is going to be hot. That’s the hard part about a new brand, that awareness outside the core needs to be created.
Watch_Dogs is ambitious in the sense that the budget is higher, or the design is more ambitious, or both?
I will say that Watch_Dogs cost more than Assassin’s Creed I, that was in 2007. The point is games have been getting more and more expensive. With Assassin’s Creed, it was an established brand when we went to make Assassin’s Creed II. We had a technology baseline, we know what the game is about and what things work. What we’re doing at that point is looking for innovation to add on top. The ambition on Assassin’s Creed is to make a great game every year; we know we have fans. With Watch_Dogs we went straight to expensive. We’ve spent four years by the time this thing launches building this product. We didn’t even know what next-gen specs would be when we started. For us, we have ambitions beyond any new brand that we’ve ever introduced as far as sales. We want it to be the biggest new brand ever introduced in the video game space.
You want Watch_Dogs to be the foundation of a big franchise, then?
Absolutely. That’s what all our games are about; we won’t even start if we don’t think we can build a franchise out of it. There’s no more fire and forget – it’s too expensive.
We feel like we’re in a really good place with Watch_Dogs, but until we’re the biggest game of the year we’re not going to be satisfied.
This fall there’s going to be tremendous attention focused on games for new consoles, but the majority of revenue will come from games for current-gen systems. Simultaneously you want to say how great your games are for new consoles, but also how the games you have for existing consoles are the best ever. That’s a difficult line to walk, isn’t it?
With Assassin’s Creed IV and Watch_Dogs, we’re shipping those games also on next-gen. We do understand that the most likely the majority of sales will occur on the current generation because people just won’t be able to get the hardware, either Xbox One or PS 4, the minute they want it because they won’t be able to make them fast enough. Those machines are going to sell well, and just like most hardware launches they’re going to be constrained for a while. The key is, when you’re making a truly next-gen experience like Watch_Dogs, it’s that the DNA of what makes that game special still exists in the current gen.
That’s what I think they’ve changed with Watch_Dogs; next-generation absolutely adds more power, more density in the environment, more immersion. But what’s cool about the game, the core cool thing, needs to translate to current-gen and it does. We haven’t actually shown those versions of the game off yet. What I like about the brand is it’s really next-gen game design, and that’s not hardware dependent. Watch_Dogs is a game that transcends hardware in my opinion. It’s really what the game is about that’s special, not that it’s on a PS 4 or a PC or an Xbox One. It’s going to be a great game on PS3, it’s going to be a great game on Wii U, it’s going to be a great game on Xbox 360.
Last we cleaned up at E3 because we were pretty much the only next-gen game around. Watch_Dogs for us is really a franchise because we’re tapping into something people really care about, never more than last week than when the NSA PRISM scandal broke.
(Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part interview. Read part two here.)
Wargaming’s World of Tanks has been tearing up the virtual battlefield with more than 60 million players. Its next attempt at creating a multiplayer masterpiece is World of Warplanes, where online military combat takes to the skies.
The game’s E3 trailer shows off the various locales and the numerous different models of warplane that players will be using to shoot their opponents out of the sky. World of Warplanes is currently in open beta.
