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Leading up to their newest release “The Last Exorcism”, a film by the brilliant Eli Roth about a young girl possessed by an evil spirit, Lions Gate Entertainment ran a great viral campaign on the webcam driven social site Chatroulette. If you are unfamiliar, Chatroulette is a site that allows users to randomly connect with others via webcam. Usually, Chatroulette would be considered one of the worst places to effectively reach and engage your audience; the visitors are typically teenage guys (and old men) who are there to try to either harass girls, expose themselves, or simply be as offensive as possible. In a brilliant move, this viral campaign perfectly engages and shocks this particularly tough demographic. It grabs the viewer’s attention by starting out as a seemingly normal Chatroulette encounter with an attractive and promiscuous girl who appears to be getting ready to undress. After a couple seconds and the audience is completely engrossed, the “conversation” takes an unexpected terrifying turn. Without ruining the surprise, I will simply say the campaign is brilliant, shocking, and fits the space exceptionally well.  The video contains language NSFW.

Besides the Chatroulette campaign, they have also created a fictional site for the movie’s priest character with other viral videos to provide a rich backstory leading up to the movie.

Frito Lay’s Cheetos have launched an ambitious new online campaign that is surprisingly very effective. It is entertaining, engaging, and very impressive considering it is a viral game centered around cheese flavored snack products.
In their campaign titled “Battle of the Cheetos” users pick a side; crunchy or puffy and do battle with other users online. It is a strategy war game where animated Cheetos fight with cheese-powered weapons to determine the superior type of Cheeto. As players win more battles they are rewarded with upgrades and more Cheeto warriors for your regiment.
The animated battlefields spring from partnered websites from which the viral game is accessed, including Mashable, Gawker, BoingBoing.net, Gizmodo, and many others. Statistics can be tracked via Facebook to determine which users are the most skilled generals for both the puffy and crunchy armies. The gameplay is simple yet engaging and like all great online multiplayer games, it allows users to taunt their opponents and trash talk via their computer’s microphone. This imaginative campaign may seem like a very strange way to promote and sell Cheetos but it is already doing an excellent job if you consider the content and depth of the game. Consumers spend an average of 12 minutes playing branded games, much longer than they would with any traditional form of advertising, also consider the Facebook connectivity and the fact that this branded game is actually quite fun to play; the Battle of the Cheetos is an impressive campaign that manages to entertain players centered entirely around the Cheetos brand. It is easily the best branded online game I have experienced and will hopefully set the tone for all branded game content that will follow.