The folks at Range Rover seem to be taking Nielsen reports on Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression to heart. Embracing social media and custom user-experience, as well as some well-thought of game mechanics -Range Rover ‘Evoque’ presents an interactive action-love-comedy-adventure-fantasy, where your choices affect Henry’s life and your hypothetical Range Rover.

The fully narrated video begins with a wake-up call for the character, Henry, whose decisions you will be manipulating.

The video does what I think is a good job in the “Players Journey”, letting you know that the objective of this promo is to control the decisions of your character.

And gives many examples to set you up for your coming input…

Shortly after the rules are laid out, you begin to engage with the video. The character walks to a street where he has to decide whether to continue walking with no destination in clear site -or stop at a deli and talk with friends. I chose to stop at the deli. Then you are asked in whether to choose the front or side door of the deli, all these little questions that you don’t really understand the meaning of. However, at this point -you’re locked into this interactive campaign and intrigued -there is no turning back, so you keep playing.

I tried gaming my answers to get clues. Here is a screen shot where I am randomly asked by one of the characters to pick my favorite nail color. After selecting ‘Red’ initially, I went back in the video to change my answer to “black” -just to see if my choice had any impact on the immediate story, which did not.  :P

However, shortly after I had made about 4 interactive decisions -Range Rover broke it down for me. Range Rover went to explain in detail which of their models fit me and why. My interactive choices to come in through the front door of the deli, to help out my grandma instead of walking away, and nail color choices all had an input in my final suggestion from Range Rover -and changing the nail color to black obviously did have an impact, as my final screen has the car in black as well.  :)

And, again, with a fair understanding of the social media aspect, Range Rover tapped into the Facebook API to allow social sharing of the campaign.

Which allows my experience to spread virally through my social network on my wall…

And the organic newsfeed to those in my social sphere.  :)

I think this is a brilliant effort by Range Rover and will increase their brand awareness socially. However, I still think they could have increased the use of game mechanics to increase social sharing of the campaign on the social sites. They could have gone further and somehow tied the game to a virtual reward for sharing. They could have also easily included a way to share on Twitter (people on Twitter buy cars too). In the current setup, once you are finished watching the video -there really is no incentive to go back to the site again -and there isn’t a strong incentive to share the final result. Virtual Rewards, such as tying the campaign to a BigDoor gamification platform -could help with that issue.

*This was originally my ending thoughts on this post, however, I wanted to time myself to update this blog post and started the Evoque campaign once more. I remembered my first go lasted about 6 minutes maybe? This time, however, when asked to continue walking down the street or stopping at the first deli to talk to friends -I chose to continue walking. I was asked again in whether to stop at a donut bakery -or cross a busy street to a newstand in the distance -I chose the more adventurous choice of crossing the busy street for the newstand. Once there, and to my surprise -I had to chose in whether to walk into a building -or help a gorgeous blonde who dropped some of her items… Duh! Easy choice!

She tells me, err -’Henry’ -that her place is on the top floor, so you follow her inside. Once inside, the conversation quickly goes to “if we’re going to screw -we need to at least align our chakras” -what?!? The video continues and eventually you have to choose in whether to stay or leave. I won’t spoil it for you, but will say that the folks at Range Rover couldn’t have done a better job on this campaign. On this second attempt, I was engaged with the story for almost ten minutes. And by the way, at the end, while the narrator is talking about the custom options for Henry’s car based on your input -the voice reminds you that you can still go back and change your options to see what would have happened if you chose Henry’s path differently.

Do you think this Range Rover campaign was a success? I would definitely say so! What a clever way for Range Rover to target ALL their fans, the lazy ones who stop to talk to their girlfriends first at the deli and don’t want to walk down a long block, the junk-food lovers bakery choice in lieu of a busy intersection crossing for a newstand made sure that only the adventurous-type would wander into the sexy encounter with the blonde and not offend other audiences. Also, in my first attempt, I was engaged for 8 minutes. My second attempt, I was engaged for almost 10 minutes! And if I were a Range Rover fan in life, I would probably go back and see all of the results possible for this interactive game -if that were the case, it would probably take an hour to go through all the multiple choices! How many traditional television commercials do you know that can keep your fans engaged for an hour???

The best part of this interactive campaign is that this project didn’t cost very much to execute. This is something that in today’s technology any established retailers and large companies can achieve at low cost, it’s not rocket science.

SpectrumDNA specializes in Social Loyalty and Gamification, please read ‘A Framework for Social Loyalty’ for more information on our work in this field.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions? I would love to hear so please share!

To check out the interactive campaign for yourself check out http://www.helloevoque.com/beinghenry/.

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