[Video of Halo: ODST viral campaign via Digital Buzz]
Do we put enough emphasis on the community building aspects of ARG campaigns? That is to say, an ad-hoc community is built based on problem solving - what is the long term strategy for maintaining, learning from, and interacting with that community? Are companies just assuming they dissolve, or recognising the resource and continuing to provide content, opportunity, and advantage?
alternate reality games as an outreach model.
I’ve written about this on my old blog, but it’s worth revisiting in short, concise format. Background on ARGs can be found here, but I’m guessing anyone reading this can get themselves to a suitable level of familiarity fairly quickly.
Building a narrative is about building an experience that people can take where they want. If you do this with something real, rather than something fictional, the line between ARG and creative, interacting outreach gets pretty blurry. but if you are doing something sufficiently interesting, and find the right mix of transparent (when important for building trust / relationships) and opaque (whether for suspense or security) you can engage people, while creating an environment of exploration around your narrative.
Any product has an experiential narrative. Most of them amount to: hear about it, get interested, learn about it, find it, obtain it, use it, (and if you are lucky) talk to the people in my life about it.
If you work in the attention industry, your job is, at core, to make either hear about it, learn about it, find it or use it as interesting and remarkable as possible, whether that excitement is innate to the product, or based on related (curated) experiences.
But if you want to do something exciting, build a new, unexpected experiential narrative framework. And watch what happens when people take the tools that you provide, and use them to supplement their own personal narrative.
