Online advertising ingenuity

Electronic Arts is releasing a new game called Dante’s Inferno and an ad agency commissioned to promote the game came up with a very unique campaign. The agency, Wieden-Kennedy, starting off with a fairly traditional move – they bought banner ads on six different video game websites. The ingenuity came into play when Wieden-Kennedy communicated a rather strange request to the six gaming websites. These six gaming websites were to include text based art in the source code of their websites – something that wouldn’t be visible on the website itself, but instead would only be seen if someone looked at the actual source code of the website. In this text based art, or ASCII art, a URL was hidden along with a password. Each of the six websites had a different password. When you visited the secret URL you were asked to enter all 6 passwords which would then let you in to the website to download exclusive, pre-release content.

The campaign ran for nearly two weeks and generated 26,000 visits to the ‘secret’ website. While the typical person really has no reason to look at the source code of a website, Wieden-Kennedy was betting that the audience interested in Dante’s Inferno would not only know how to find the hidden messages, but that the concept alone would give the campaign more legs than the standard banner ads would have. And they were right, because here I sit as an online marketing consultant with relatively no interest in the game, admiring the creative of the online marketing campaign.

Kudos to Wieden-Kennedy!