I noticed via SEJournal that Yahoo!'s "Search Light Award" was given out yesterday in New York to Honda's interactive ad agency for their "Element" SUV. What I don't understand is why...
The game created by the agency, RPA Interactive, isn't particularly fun or interesting or groundbreaking. It doesn't do a great job of branding the Element as anything in particular (other than related to off-roading on animal-filled islands). It lacks the ability to get a lot of search traffic or segmentation (since it's all a single game in a single flash file). I'm just not sure what the critical acclaim is about.
To me, bidding on terms like possum (since it's an inexpensive keyword) to get traffic to the game is reasonably creative, but the work itself just doesn't seem exceptional to me. Am I missing something? Maybe after you collect all the animals on the island the game gets cool, but it isn't compelling enough to make me look at the Element.
Not too good from an interaction design/gaming standpoint. As a person involved in Flash development I know that an app like this takes many hours from skilled OOP programmers. Lot of resources went into this one. But they should have spent more time and effort on the storyline because it sure is not interesting or engaging at all.
Funny, it seems to me any time a big company wants to go viral they spend a fortune producing a high budget poor piece of work. Most good viral belongs to the underground.
Boy, the flash animation was so slow to load that is froze my computer!