Best social game

Has your game leveraged social media to create a community or competitive environment around the game? Are consumers constantly playing your game via social channels? Has your game leveraged social media to change the industry?

Winner: Gillette’s Blade Change Challenge

Overview: Razor company Gillette launched a new ad campaign in 2010 to get male customers to replace their worn razor blades on a more regular basis. Working with the firm Proximity Canada and the interactive game application E‐Axis, Gillette’s campaign utilized national television ads, online ads, a “razor repair” microsite, and a Facebook game. The interactive game, called “Gillette’s Blade Change Challenge,” invites users to shoot razor blades off a Gillette razor, aiming the blades at different items, and progressing through different levels of difficulty. Users gain points by successfully hitting objects in a virtual garage. The game also had a leaderboard displaying top‐ scoring players. Gillette gave away 1,000 free ProGlide blade samples through its Facebook page.

Impact: Gillette’s Facebook game had more than 20,000 monthly active users, while blade consumption increased by two cartridges per household annually, and the purchase rate went up 12%. Meanwhile, awareness of the indicator strip turning white while shaving is up more than 10 points, and awareness of the indicator strip turning white as the key sign to change the blade is up 14 points.

Finalists

Motorola’s Moto Arcade

Overview: Motorola and ad agency Cake created a Flash‐based Facebook application called Moto Arcade to promote the company’s newest phones, as well as its Facebook page. The application re‐ imagined several well‐known retro arcade games, including Space Invaders and Brickbreaker, as virtual, interactive Motorola‐branded games. Moto Strike, Backflip Breaker, and Charm Quiz were made available through Facebook and smart phone applications. Players could challenge friends and share high scores with one another. Motorola also held a Moto Arcade launch party in New York City, transforming an empty space into a retro arcade. The lounge featured the games and incentivized partygoers to log into Facebook, “like” Motorola, play the games, and share the experience with their friends through Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.

Impact: Thousands of people played MotoArcade on Facebook and on their smart phones. Launch party attendees were incentivized from pre‐event through post event to share and talk about Moto Arcade and Motorola via social outlets, resulting in a wide digital footprint from the event that included an estimated Twitter reach of 150,000 and a million impressions from 36 blog posts.