Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Live Green Go Yellow ARG campaign

A buddy of mine pointed me to the recent alternate reality game (ARG) from GM for their "Live Green, Go Yellow" campaign promoting ethanol fuel. The campaign is called, "Who is Benjamin Stove?" and is basically a conspiracy theory about some family's history and crop circles. Overall, I'm not impressed.

I spent the last 30 minutes navigating through various blogs and other destinations and have been... underwhelmed. The initial hook itself never got me excited, some guy finds an old painting of crop circles in his family home.... crop circles, oh boy! There's a hidden note inside the painting?! I didn't see that one coming. It goes downhill from there. The ingredients are all there for a good ARG, they just cooked it badly.

Don't get me wrong, I love ARGs, just not this one. If you want to experience a really cool ARG, check out the Giantology blog. It's the first step in a very elaborate ARG for the Playstation "Shadow of the Colossus" game. (Full disclosure, I used to work for Tequila, the agency that did this campaign. BTW, Congratulations to Nick, Glenn, Mako and team, they won a huge award for this campaign last week!)

If you stumble upon any new ARGs, let me know.

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