Did Viral Marketing Damage the Hasbro Brand?

A few days ago Hasbro launched a free online version of Monopoly called Monopoly City Streets that makes use of Google Maps in order for players to be able to purchase locations across the globe. I too have begun playing this monopoly game thinking it’s going to be a lot of fun. The game is a bit like the original board game with a drop of ‘Age of Empires’. You purchase a street and start building on it. You then earn rent based on the size if the building and what street it’s on. Basically, you earn money and expand… it’s that easy.

The game is the brainchild of Hasbro’s U.K. agency, Tribal DDB and the concept itself is fantastic. But there seems to be a long way now from the original concept of creating a massive multi-player game to leverage the Hasbro brand and promote the coming 3D version of the board game and what we have.

By all accounts there are 1.7 million unique users and the interest seems to have overwhelmed the servers leading to frustration and disappointment. Further, the game has already prone to chronic cheating. I think people are cheating by creating more than one account and then selling the property cheaply to their main account. I just don’t want to see it turn into a cheating feast to see who can create the most accounts and money launder the most. But Perhaps cheating is how the real world works anyways.

Not surprisingly, what was touted as the “biggest land grab of 2009″ has turned into another online fiasco of overloaded servers and massive cheating. This has resulted in yet another brand damaged by poor execution and consideration for the details. I give the folks at Tribal DDB 5 stars for the idea. 1 star to the team supporting and managing this imploding disaster. To add insult to injury, I believe that they are going to ‘re-start’ the game and those poor soles having invested many hours finding streets, selecting just the right location for that building and even trying build a neat community will loose this and need to it down to ‘a learning experience’. The official blog site is now littered with frustrated posted and company apologies.

Clearly, a lesson in not what to do for a client in viral marketing.

September 15, 2009 · Filed Under Social Media

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What does an advanced Japanese mobile commerce and entertainment provider do in China?

Yesterday night at Mobile Monday Beijing #29 Wang Yong, CEO of DeNA China shared with us his humble plans for China. I say humble as Wang must have mentioned 3 times during his presentation that replicating DeNA’s extremely successful Japanese services in China is impossible. Before I will describe why Wang did not expect DeNA to do very well in China I will briefly introduce DeNA.

DeNA?
DeNA is the biggest mobile social network in Japan. Currently it has 632 employees with a market cap of USD1.5 billion. Their most popular service is called Mobile Game Town (Mobagetown), a service that primarily attracts users by offering free games and that monetizes through advertising. Other services of DeNA include several successful m-commerce related portals such as Mobaoku (mobile C2C), Pocket Affiliate (Japans largest mobile advertising affiliate network), Mobagetown L (services targeted at Ladies) and Mobakore (fashion retail, 79% female users). DeNA has around 14.2 million users in Japan that are good for 18 billion page views per month.

As one of DeNA’s most popular services Mobagetown was launched back in 2006 it offered games for free. As a result users were rather young at that time: over 70% were teenagers. This has changed in the last few years, currently over 60% of DeNA users are over 20 years old which means they can spend money and are worth more to advertisers. DeNA has over 500,000 partner sites to advertise to mobile users. Wong explains that, among others, advertisers can place ads on the front-page, place text ads between search results, and advertise through (mobile) mail. Moreover Mobagetown has partnerships with big brands to integrate their brand in the service. For instance users could at some point get a Coca Cola avatar. Read more

June 9, 2009 · Filed Under China, Japan, Mobile 2.0, Social Media