A successful run-through of the game.
To launch the new SoBe Energy Coolatta, we designed a sweepstakes promotion that would dovetail with the above-the-line media being developed by Hill Holliday, who still handled TV for Dunkin' at the time. The commercials had a song called "Rip Things In Half," a sort of satirical nu-metal jam, playing loudly while people ripped objects in half after taking a sip of the Coolatta—a phonebook, a car, etc.
The game features four Boston musicians from bands such as Bang! Camaro and the Good North. The player must keep them supplied with SoBe Energy Coolattas to keep their instrument in-sync with the others. This required us to encode the song as layered tracks (as one sees in audio recording software suites) on the Flash timeline, then mix them together in real-time. As the energy levels of one of the band members dropped, their track would slow down and, eventually, cut out altogether, while the musician's avatar follows suit: slumping and sagging to a stuttering halt. If you kept their levels up, the song stayed on-tempo and in-sync and, after 30 seconds or so, it ends, giving you your stats and score. In either case, your sweeps entry is valid, the winning and losing was simply a status effect you could choose to share with your social networks (which, you may or may not recall, was a weird thing that people—mostly Boomers—actually did for a couple of years in the Aughts).
As this was a Flash game, I can no longer provide live links to a demo (Flash is officially dead af), but I was able to locally run the original files in a Flash emulator and record a screen-capture of the game, as seen in the video above.
Strategy
We were fond of sweeps-as-a-strategy to drive awareness of new products because, at the time, this was very on-trend. "Sweepers" were still a thing, and you could reliably count on a certain amount of traffic from the various sites that tracked such things. As it happened, the sweeper folks—who diligently entered as many sweepstakes as humanly possible every week—had significant overlap with the core Dunkin' audience, so we leaned in.
Backstory
This was one of my first big projects for Studiocom (now part of VML), where I had recently started working. In a nutshell: HillHolliday had dropped the ball and I was asked to essentially invent and pitch this thing in two days. Fortunately, I was coming off a years-long stretch where all I did was "be in a band." I stayed up all night, slept all day, played a lot of shows, did freelance when necessary—that was my life. This had left me with a large network of local musicians and other content creators, as well as a ton of practical experience with sound engineering—both studio and live setups—and friends in the video production industry. Since the song being used in the commercials being a rock song, it seemed to me like the stars had aligned. I used personal footage of my friends on-stage and put together some comps for the pitch—this was our first significant (i.e., non-banner) assignment for the client and the technical challenge behind the concept was so large that even our lay-people clients found it apparent—HillHolliday's account team said it would amount to vaporware, essentially. It was understandable—nothing like this had been done before in Flash for something like a sweepstakes landing, it would cost too much, require too big a team, generally. But the material was compelling and, as a rare bird who could code the ActionScript, do the design and branding, and direct the video shoot, I was promising to get the majority of it done as a one-man team, thus keeping the cost in-bounds. We got the approval.
The original conceptual design, used to sell the idea.
Credits: CD: Max Fresen; Art Director: Max Fresen; Copywriter: Max Fresen; Actionscript: Max Fresen + Michael Creati
