Tohato - one of the greats of engagement marketing on mobile | SMLXL - Business and Communication Innovation from Alan Moore

Tohato – one of the greats of engagement marketing on mobile

February 23rd, 2010

Perhaps one of the most innovative FMCG launches anywhere – whilst others think that Buy One Get Free will suffice, Oh Well.

Tomi Ahonen, my co-author of Communities Dominate Brands provides insight into the mechanics and success of the launch. And one has to ask is this the future of marketing – well for my money this looks a lot more attractive than another poorly conceived, badly written and executed 30 sec spot – or an idle banner ad, that pretends to look important – but really isn’t.

Tohato used Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo to create the launch campaign for the new snacks. And what a campaign they designed, indeed. They designed a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Not only that, but their game ran on mobile phones – another relatively rare phenomenon in the MMOG space, most MMOGs like World of Warcraft, CounterStrike and Lineage 2 are designed for personal computers.

Then – the recruitment of the players/gamers/army. Each side recruited an “Evil Army” based on the brand of snack and those who liked that flavour. Gamers could join the Habanero Evil Army, or the Satan Jorquia Evil Army. To sign up, you had to buy a bag of the snacks and scan the 2D barcode with the cameraphone (83% of Japanese already use the 2D Barcode feature, so this is quite commonplace in Japan today, certainly among the youth, who were the target audience, classic Generation C for Community)

Once in the game, gamers were encouraged to recruit friends to join that Evil Army. The recruiter would gain promotions in the army depending on new recruits, and their recruits. A classic pyramid scheme and remarkably viral. A private was promoted to sergeant, then promoted to lieutanent, then to captain, etc.. The armies had 31 battlefields to win the World’s Worst War. These had again really appealing names for this generation, like Sweet Sucker’s Execution Hall, the City of Anal Torture, and Shadap Bay. Remember the target audience, this is exactly the kinds of names that are cool to them. They generated enormous traffic, 100,000 page views per day. And the game had a 24 hour news alert service to inform gamers what was going on, who died, which team won the latest battle, who was promoted, etc.

Christopher Billich from Infinita gives us some more info,

Players were rewarded with more than 120 collectible wallpapers,for capturing bases, including some very hard to get ones that could only be obtained by players that met a number of objectives. They actually did three installments of this game between October 2007 and April 2008. By the last installment, the game mechanics had become quite sophisticated, including training your soldier (on site, once a day max.) to boost his powers, rank not only depending on the number of people recruited, but also on battles fought/won etc.

It also featured an intricate system of gaining/losing “information points” by posting strategically relevant information to the own army’s BBS and eavesdropping on the other side’s conversations, which I thought was pretty cool. You could even defect to the other army if you saw things going downhill for your side.

Tohato demonstrates, how to make advertising money work hard, to attract, engage and change behaviour. It also drives advocacy and word of mouth. It also demonstrates the binding power of co-creation communication strategies, and frankly I have become bored as to whether the media bean counters can count this type of activity. The you just need to look at cost of investment for the campaign and the sales that are directly attributable to that investment.

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