92 The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World
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The creative team created a YouTube video that appears at first glance to be
just another of the many ‘sizzle reels’ featuring sneak-peeks of upcoming
video games.But there’s a twist. As the game footage plays, things take an unexpected
turn when Wario’s on-screen antics start to affect the entire YouTube screen,
trashing the user interface and gradually reducing the page to rubble. Users
can then interact with the wreckage of the page, tossing pieces around and
even replaying the video in the dislodged player following the carnage.Results
Success for this campaign was measured in both awareness and total game
sales. For the former, the campaign smashed the goal of 12–15 per cent
awareness within the target group, reaching an extraordinary 24 per cent
according to figures provided by the agency. Game sales fell short of the pre-
campaign goal of 350,000 units by the end of 2008, a fact the campaign team
attributes to a subdued economy and lower game sales across the industry.Wario Land ‘Shake It’ caused quite a stir when it first appeared. It was an
interactive first for YouTube, garnered over four million views in just one
month and was widely praised across gaming websites and blogs. Two days
after launch, Jen Wilson, an interactive producer with Goodby, Silverstein &
Partners, overheard an enthusiastic group of kids talking about the page while
riding the BART home from work in San Francisco. Within a month or two,
copycat interactive ads were appearing all over the web, with similar shaking-
and-breaking effects used to disrupt web pages. YouTube told the creative
team that they were inundated with calls from advertisers asking ‘Why didn’t
you tell us we could do stuff like that?’ The response: ‘You never asked.’