A lot of the content on Infovore is these days is in my links; I try to make sure that I’m not just chucking out URLs, but at least providing some kind of commentary or annotation on them.

You might have seen a Youtube video entitled “Bike Hero” in my links yesterday. I believe I said that “there is nowhere that this is anything less than awesome”.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to retract that statement, because there is one way it could be somewhat less than awesome. And that’s if it isn’t quite what it purports to be.

Bike Hero, it turns out, is a “viral” ad for Guitar Hero World Tour, filmed by an advertising agency.

I’m disappointed not because it’s fake, but because they felt the need to disguise it as a real piece of footage. Derek Powazek puts it nicely:

Longer answer: It’s not that it’s a commercial, it’s that it’s a hidden commercial. It’s not the art, it’s the ruse.

Why don’t marketers and advertisers understand that, sometimes, the target audience for this kind of thing will like it just as much if it’s honest about being advertising? It’s a lovely piece of footage, and it ties into the garage-band, DIY ethos well; it’s a good fit for the Guitar Hero brand. As it is, I’m disappointed because I now know this wasn’t the product of hard-working fans, wanting to promote a product they love; it was the product of a lot of time/effort from people with money to spend on time/effort.

My other disappointment comes from another thing it pretends to be: it’s not one take. The CG staff that Gamecyte highlights were responsible for compositing the LED-handdlebar rig, and might well also have been involved in stitching together multiple takes. One of the things that had value in this ad was that it was real – why else would the cyclist turn his camera to the window he drove by other than to prove this isn’t some kind of fakery?

In the MTV Multiplayer blogpost linked above, Brad Jakeman, Activision’s Chief Creative Officer comments:

“This was always created and put out there to engage the creativity of our gamers. It didn’t take people very long, as we expected it to, for them to unlock the first of the codes, if you like… We wanted people to first figure out that it was something in the marketing realm and then dig in and have more of the conversation that we’re having about how it was done, have people figure out where all the cutting points were, where there was potentially CGI, and engage with that. It’s not meant to be deceptive. It’s meant to be fun.”

And what about people who aren’t “your gamers”? The point of viral videos is that they become viral; they have a life outside their initial target. Will that secondary audience be as inquisitive as the gamers you describe – and, to be honest, will even all those gamers engage in the manner you describe? I’d linked the thing up before I considered it might be marketing material. I enjoyed the video, and I assumed this was a product of effort rather than trickery simply because I’m not as cynical as Activision would like; if there’s one thing the Internet has taught me, it’s that people have a lot of reserves of creativity within them. Why assume that putting out trickery is OK just because you believe that your audience assume everything is trickery?

Sorry if I misled you. It’s still a great video, but it’s an advert, not a fan-made video, and you should probably know that going into it.

Katy, over at Kitschbitch, writes about Nokia’s new “transmedia” advertising campaign, and comments on it’s ARG-iness – or rather, its un-ARG-iness – and feels disappointed, saying:

…given that Nokia were the trailblazers of using immersive play to engage with consumers, doesn’t it feel like they’ve missed a bit of a trick here?

I was going to comment, but my comment grew and grew, and it felt like a post in its own right.

I’m not sure I’d agree with some of Katy’s criticisms. What’s emerged as a “traditional ARG” has basically consistently turned out to be very engaging for a tiny number of users, very costly to run, and usually exhausting for all concerned. They’re difficult to sustain and few companies ever go for a second ARG.

So a “campaign you can interact with” is a much more realistic interpretation of an ARG, you could argue: it requires far less involvement to get people in, meaning that your advertising dollar reachers more end users; it doesn’t require too much of a long term committment; it’s not community driven, meaning people can have the experience on their own, without having to invest time in building new relationships; whilst it’s interactive, it’s a constrained form of interaction, meaning it’s easier to control and keep on the rails.

The one thing it does have in common with an ARG is that it’s timeboxed: it runs for six weeks. Want to play it after those six weeks? Tough. That’s actually one of the biggest problems facing ARGs: getting away from that timeboxed nature.

So whilst it’s not the bleeding edge of ARG design, it’s probably a much more practical decision for an advertising division on Nokia: it’s less of a loss-leader than another Beast or ILoveBees; it’s engaging a broader degree of consumers but at a shallower level; it’s an order of magnitude or three less complex than a full-blown ARG.

I’m not necessarily convinced by the implementation, but I don’t think the lack of scope is reason for criticism per se; if anything, the “simple ARG” is perhaps harder to get right than the long, complex narrative that you can fix in retcon later on. The upfront budget – advertising, filming, media costs – here is bigger than most ARGs; the running cost is smaller. That sounds like a sensible way of keeping costs where you’re in control of them.

And so I think I’d argue that it’s actually more innovative than throwing a massive ARG budget at the problem: they’re trying to learn from ARGs to see what an affordable, practical interactive campaign, made by advertising/digital media agencies (rather than ARG agencies) might look like. That’s got to be worth a point or two.