Help Sparky the dog reunite with his long lost love.
No, not by choosing a mate from a dog breeder, but through following his story on TV, playing games on your mobile phone, and finding hints on Facebook.
It’s a virtual love story that StarHub, who is running Singapore’s first interactive commercial, hopes will create lots of brand publicity for them. The commercial was unveiled on the big screen at a media preview held at GV Vivocity cinemas today.
The catch is that it doesn’t only play out on TV, YouTube or the cinema screen, but also on mobile phones and computers through interactive gaming — the first time it is done here locally. It’s not exactly a full-blown alternate reality game (ARG), but it contains some elements of it.
How it is works is that viewers first download StarHub’s free Hub IT! app for iPhones and Androids. Whenever StarHub’s “Love Tail” advertisement runs, they simply fire up the app, and point their phone’s camera at the screen.
The Fetch-A-Reward app function will use visual and sound cues to detect if this Starhub commercial is running. If it is, it unlocks certain games on the app that viewers can play.
For example, at the preview where I was at, the game unlocked was a cute 2D sidescrolling platformer, where digitized Sparky had to fight fires by peeing on them.
The whole purpose of jumping through all these hoops? Besides the intrinsic fun, StarHub is giving away a prize pool that includes S$10,000 and goodies like an Apple Macbook Air, iPad2, and Samsung 3D TV to dedicated viewers who follow the unfolding story and unlock achievements.
Social media also has a part to play in this interactive commercial, where StarHub will release tips on how to progress via their Facebook channel, and the whole campaign runs for 16 days from 26th August to 10th September.
Besides this, StarHub will also offer instant rewards like GV movie vouchers and StarHub store credits when people snap QR codes of their print ads, which will be scattered across 600 bus stop shelters island-wide.
Reinforcing Starhub as top Hubbing telco
StarHub’s head of sales and marketing, Mr Ng Long Shyang, said that this branding campaign hopes to reinforce StarHub’s strength in their triple-play bundling of mobile, broadband and pay-TV, which they popularized in Singapore as “hubbing”.
As the interactive commercial uses all platforms, it’s a good branding showcase and shows StarHub’s strengths as the “original hubbing company” versus “wannabe hubbing companies”, said Long Shyang.
They hope to get at least 30,000 to 40,000 fans who will follow Sparky’s story.
StarHub declined to reveal the cost of the project that took two-and-a-half months to put together, but said that “it is within our normal advertising spend”, as they explore beyond print advertising to other mediums.
