Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Richard Sweeting - Internet Entrepreneur of the year

I very much consider online Fantasy Football Leagues to be a great example of viral marketing – Especially the mini league sections. Someone reads a newspaper and sets up a league. He or she then tells all of their friends to join in.

This year I am part of the Telegraph competition. I like the fact Alan Hanson has a team so I can pit my managerial / soccer knowledge against his. Pity it is not very easy to see how many points Alan has got though.

It’s well worth having a look at how the transfer system works. The Telegraph want you to purchase their paper. Therefore to enable player transfers you must enter a code printed every Wednesday.

Now Google the following: “Telegraph Fantasy Football password”. 1,000 websites and blogs with this code on!



I particularly like http://www.richardsweeting.org/pages/telegraph.html. Richard is accepting donations via his pay pal account for telling you the code. Very funny.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Cheating and viral campaigns

Inspired by this blog article on a Google / Da Vinci Code fiasco.

I often encounter cheating in the viral campaigns we create. To me it is simply part of the game - Get your enjoyment in any way that you see fit. One attempt stands out from the crowd though…

4T2 were running a racing game competition for Exchange & Mart in 2003. The game recorded your laps making cheating very hard as you could watch a replay of any previous performance. Check out X-chase. As this is not live any more we do not monitor it. The people claiming to have completed a lap time in one second are hacking the game. However, they will not have a valid recording. At the time we deleted these players.

The prize was a new Pay As You Go mobile phone – WOW.

One morning I received an email from Exchange & Mart informing me that the current leader was cheating and requesting that we delete his entry. I can only find the version I forwarded to our client but here you go. Click on the image below:


So I watched a replay of the current leader and could not see anything wrong with it. I was also very surprised at the pro-activeness of our client to do all of this. Therefore I took a second look at the email. Check out the email address.


Therefore I emailed “Tanya” back and received a complete confession from a suitably guilty sounding young man. He simply wanted to win and had invested so much time in this endeavour that he was willing to try anything.

I can’t remember if we sent him a prize for doing this or not - I hope we did. But hey, if you invest this much effort into a brands marketing campaign, surely you should be rewarded.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Lego’s Bionicle game shows how you should do it

This is one great viral game. Fun, addictive, attractive and cleverly put together. I especially like the awards section where you win badges for completing certain in game achievements - Someone’s been playing on an Xbox 360.



One thing I did notice though - Lego used to be very good at linking to on pack promotions for power ups etc and I can’t find this on the campaign. Perhaps it is later on. Pity (and I think a mistake) if they have dropped the idea.

For a similar game produced by 4T2 check out Spyware Shooter

Any thoughts? Anyone know who made it?