Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

Dan Hon and Mindcandy

by Rachel on April 2nd, 2007

One of the most enjoyable SXSW sessions for me was Attack of the ARGs. Following a comment on my write-up, I met up with Dan Hon the COO of Mindcandy to ask about Perplex City and some of the thinking behind the marketing of the project. Over a couple of sessions, Dan was kind enough to cover a lot of ground. Forgive me if it jumps around a bit, it was taken down as a first person transcript, but I’ve tidied it up a little and tried to focus on key areas - and it’s a lot harder than it looks! I’m sure if I made any mistakes in the writing, Dan will correct me.

In 2001 Adrian and Dan Hon started playing The Beast; almost everyone now in the ARG world comes from there, except 42Entertainment and LonelyGirl15. After that he worked with Microsoft for a while to develop a sequel, writing a lot about the process on blogs. Mike (Smith) had started researching ARGs and came across them, started to share ideas about how to monetise, with the ARG being part of the brand.

Three years ago, the company all started with Mike; now there are 19 full timers and 9 freelancers, all bar one based on London. Dan did not join full-time immediately, wanting to complete his legal degree, but once this was done he quickly started full time, the job being far more fun than the alternatives. The thinking behind the company is that it want to own and develop IP, not turn into an agency that works for others, but they are increasingly being approached with requests to do bespoke games for companies.

Perplex City started out as Project Syzergy, as a recruitment campaign. Ads were run in Marketing Week and The Guardian, with the team subtly giving pointers to these in the communities they were participating in. They were pretty open about being up to something, something they found exciting, and the communities opened up to them, were vocal in their support. It started to be picked up in the press, with The Guardian doing pieces on them, The Culture Show covering it. They were pretty lucky in some of the coverage, but by being active in the communities, by knowing how to get people’s attention in the right places they turned up the buzz. They had people applying for jobs, stalking the offices and the staff and the journalists picked up on them. They have recently employed a PR firm, before that it was all inhouse and there was a disproportionate amount of buzz just for existing, not for the content and quality. It’s going to get harder and harder to get coverage, as they are no longer new. Take a look at the reaction on Slashdot, railing against the ubiquity of flash countdowns. The bar has been raised and people are now starting to tune out the more ‘conventional’ stuff. Not surprisingly, the audience becomes more savvy and are quick to turn away from stuff that is not good. In the press, ARGs are no longer as cool, getting coverage is harder and content needs to be stronger.

The original story was plotted to last 9 months, but it kept getting longer and longer. The major points were all plotted out and there were real world events with fixed dates in the story. But they had delays in starting the game, technical issues with printing led to a large delay. They ended up staggering the release, with the cards first and then the site. They continued to do pre-game marketing, with fun things on the site, auto-responders, puzzles, graphics, kept giving hints and introducing the audience to the players. They were basically trying to keep it kicking over. When the game started, they had to keep it going, the original planned arcs were supplemented with new ones, as they adapted to the players. Players got things very quickly, which meant they always needed new content and just-in-time content delivery kills the team. Although this could be kept up for a short time, any longer and people start to burn out. Things like getting the people to write a book were put in place, which have then some breathing room. But at the moment, Dan thinks no-one in the industry has solved this well and they are looking at the TV industry which churns out a lot of content to see if lessons can be learnt.

The strain on the team is not helped by the difficulty in recruiting people, technical people especially. They look for great flash game developers and for people who can do more traditional content. The difficulty is finding people with these skills who are comfortable in a fluid environment, with multiple platforms and content threads. They find there is a tendency for people to say they can do it, but there is not a lot of experience out there; the main recruiting ground tends to be the ARG communities themselves, which is not that big. Over half have come from the community; often they interview people and describe what they do but it takes a long time for people to get it if they have not played. It takes time, money and effort to put it all together and there are only so many people who can put them together and who have time to play the games. Moving forward, they agree they need to be far smarter with their content to avoid burning out the creatives and work out more in advance to move away from just-in-time model. (I’m sure some of this thinking played into the recent decision to delay the start of Season 2 until June, as they test story lines and gameplay.)

With Season 1, one issue is that whilst a detailed world is appealing, it’s difficult to come into it at a later, date. Newcomers are left feeling they need to do it all and the information overload is offputting. The detail itself is not a bad thing, the challenge they have is presenting it in a way to let people explore it in their own way, to take in the complex message. So moving forward, they are thinking about the control of the journey, about being cleaner about what they are about, They are also separating the elements; the puzzle cards, the revenue generating part of the business, can be treated separately from the ARG. You can do the cards on their own, without getting into the deeper story - welovepuzzles.com is the home for this and Perplex City Stories is the home for the ARG, They also offer other puzzle-based products, such as the board game.

The intention with the cards was to offer something that was different to the typical low quality books that you find in newsagents and make something cool that you want to try, but you don’t have to do both parts of the game. The cards themselves are hard to produce, they have a very long lead-time (up to 3 months) and what they wanted led to easily annoyed printers. Finding printers to work with was difficult, it was one of the things that led to the first part extending from 9 months to 2.5 years.

The first season ended in February and going into season 2, they are thinking about the game a lot like TV, with episodes, which also allows them to explore alternate revenue, such as episode sponsors as it is easier to do that with discrete story lines, allowing them to include the sponsor within the game, to add value, but have to be careful not just to bolt them on, so need to pick carefully. This is one way they can work with companies that come to them to build their own games, bringing them into the overall world they have developed already. For this to work, they look for equal buy-in from both parties, they need to work with people who get it. One thing that I have found with agencies and companies is that it is too easy to jump on whatever hot bandwagon there is, to get the PR of being involved, of being cool - just look at Second Life. Mindcandy’s desire to work only with people who can really add something makes good sense in the end game of producing quality content.

As well as the puzzles and the game, Dan mentioned they have some super-secret stuff they are working on to be bought to the public at a later date. I’m looking forward to finding out what that is, given their success to date with their products. I had a great conversation with Dan, an interesting glimpse to what goes on behind the scenes in a commercial ARG. There some lessons to be learnt from ARGs that can be applied to similar marketing plans, such as guerrilla or teaser marketing:

• Being part of the community you want to attract helps with early buzz and allows you to entice them to what you are doing. Doing that conversation yourself instead of through a PR team helps with the direct feedback
• The audience will always surprise you and make you work harder to keep up with them. They are smarter than you, you have to assume you will be found out pretty quickly (if you are doing teaser work) and have your next steps lined up, as well as contingency plans just in case it does not go as you expect it.
• The audience is pretty savvy, don’t expect to jump on bandwagons and everything to go as you want. You are expected to deliver something more than just doing the cool thing, you have to do it well.

There’s now a transcript of the SXSW panel on Mindcandy’s blog.

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POSTED IN: Alternate Reality Experience, Fun and Games