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Concept storyboards ▾ I put together three concepts of an interactive MPU banner. Two made use of some nifty 3d animation of Mr.Monopoly and the other gave a teaser of the gameplay and visual style of the actual game.
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Making the Rich Media MPU ▾ After a concept was chosen It was time to create the 3D character animation, the flash files and supporting graphics and mesh them all together in Google’s double-click system to serve the Ads across the web.
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Homepage Take-overs ▾ Within the advertising budget we selected to do 24 hour homepage takeovers for AOL, MSN and Yahoo using the Rich Media MPU and additional assets tailored for each.
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Splash page and site assets ▾ We then created a splash page to give more details of the game along with the usual suite of assets to support it, completing the campaign.
1. Concept storyboards
Concept 1 – “Win big in the city”
The first concept uses brand recognition to spark interaction, allowing them to play a little to entice them to continue playing on The National Lottery site.
Concept 2 – “Turn Monopoly Money into Real Money”
‘Monopoly money’ has no real value. In our case though, we were giving players a chance to win real money. This transition seemed key.
Concept 3 – “Turn Monopoly Money into Real Money”
As an alternative to legal tender I made use of the Lottery’s novelty cheque’s. It tied the two brands together nicely while still pushing the prize.
2. Making the Rich Media MPU
Once the concept was chosen we set a 3D artist to work on Mr.Monopoly and Phil Mason of Hype Studios was brought on to assist me putting the whole thing together on Google’s double-click platform. A bonus of working on well established games is the quality of the assets. It’s rare I can download a huge zip file filled with high-res or vector material, including a rigged 3d model ready to go.
My first job was to work out all the specs as the media plan was quite complex, some of which required negotiation with the media owners. In total there were four Rich Media MPU’s all with different specifications for the target sites, a full suite of standard banners, two homepage takeovers, a landing page and of course all the usual supporting site assets for The National Lottery. It goes without saying the deadline was tight and they all had to be tested and good to go on the same day.
Bringing it all together was pretty tricky, not only with the timings of the animation, but the restrictions on file size and dimensions as well as limits on interactions and triggers so people could actually see the video. I didn’t want these banners to be annoying, I wanted them to be engaging and for people to actually see Mr.Monopoly jump out of the MPU; He would do the rest.
3. Homepage Takeovers
These were great to do. The first was an extension of the MPU we were already working on, making use of additional banner space and image mantels. We were basically given permission to attack AOL.co.uk and dress it up like a christmas tree, Monopoly style. We had more space to work with on this one so we extended the streaming video to include some money flying out of the middle of the page, which you can see it in the video at the top.
The second was a very simple background image that sat behind the Yahoo mail login page. This was a brand new medium at the time, ours being the second campaign to ever use it. I liked its simplicity, and was a nice break from all the flash work.
4. Splash page and site assets
Once people had clicked on any of the external advertising, they would be taken to The National Lottery and begin their purchase journey. I put together this splash page to enforce what they had seen already, welcoming them to The National Lottery and what to do next in order to play. It also allowed us to easily see the analytics, and measure the success of the campaign and any drop-off’s once they arrived into the site – useful information for future campaigns. Naturally the site was also given a full suite of assets to support the campaign on key pages.