“Paparazzi” Advergame Stalks the Pop Culture Obsessed

January 26th 2006 - Adotas.com

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.