What The…? Court TV, Suzuki + Applebee’s Walk Into A Bar…

This is the beginning of what turns out to be a bad joke for all three of these brands. Turns out that the marketing directors of Court TV, Suzuki and Applebee’s got together and decided to make an alternate reality game. Why you ask? We have no idea. Maybe there’s some secret marketing data that we’re not privy to that aligns the trinity. Hold on kids, because it only gets weirder from here.

So, these guys get together with small agency Deep Focus (mistake #1) to launch an ARG called, “Save My Husband.” While it’s amazing that they are taking on a gaming project, the thing about ARGs is that they are notoriously hard to pull off. Why they contacted Deep Focus for such intricate work, we’ll never know as the agency is great for media buying and brand promotion, but… The sophistication required for such a large-scale game? No. No way. It’d be like calling up Kenneth Lay for accounting advice.

The plot was simple enough: fictional husband Andrew Goodis had been kidnapped and his wife was trying to find him. Over 8 days, clues and puzzles were provided for the players to answer. To win – you needed to provide the names of the people behind the kidnapping and the location of where Andrew was being held.

Unfortunaely, the game was so poorly set-up that it quickly began to fall apart 3 DAYS BEFORE THE GAME WENT LIVE. Quickly, the URL structure of the site was discovered and all the daily videos and clues were revealed (mistake #2). So, Deep Focus had to rejigger the clues from the get-go. Look – gamers are serious computer geeks. If you’re going to build a game, which is going to live mainly online, you gotta make it intricate, bury your data and leave no trail. Gamers also found the contact info for the Deep Focus staff working on the game in a Google cache (mistake #3). Not knowing what Deep Focus was players began calling staffers as if they were holding Andrew. Oh boy… Then, because the ARG was clearly not thought out there were 6013 winners splitting the 25K prize money (mistake #4). That’s $4.15 per person. Wow. Sure makes it worth playing doesn’t it? This is a fast lesson in how to ruin your brand image in a particular demo long term. Beware.

Needless to say, the backlash isn’t pretty. Here’s a sample.

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