The Challenge: GameTap is a subscription-based, online gaming network that launched in October 2005. Developed by Turner Broadcasting Systems, GameTap was the first service of its kind combining desktop, broadband and arcade gaming all in one. Something so cool needed to be made famous and attract subscribers to help Turner pay the bills.

That’s where The Barbarian Group came in. Many of us are gamers so we knew the target market. But we also knew that we are a hard to reach bunch, scattered across the Internet, not congregating on portals such as Yahoo and MSN. On top of that we knew that the gamers and tastemakers that Turner wanted to reach are extremely cynical of advertising. In order to be successful we had to understand their markets, their lifestyle, and their belief systems. We had to live and breathe their passions. We had to develop the exact level of irony and non-marketing tone needed.

What We Did to Make It Awesome: There is a strong tradition in the gaming community of developing “fan fiction” – fake Friendster profiles, blogs, films, even new games. We decided to leverage GameTap’s intellectual property cache and use it to build fan fiction of our own. We developed blogs, fake sites, photo-journals, social networking profiles, personal ads and classifieds. Each of them was bizarre, obscure or just plain ridiculous.

Each piece of the campaign was scattered across the Internet, casting a net so wide that we were able to reach the target where they were hanging out, instead of hoping that they would stumble upon a GameTap banner. Each piece was then linked to another, creating a labyrinth of sorts that lead the user to the Power Up server where we began collecting their registration information. At this point the jig was up and we had to do some real marketing in order to convert the user into a lead. Therefore, from the start everything was done tongue-in-cheek so as not to alienate the consumer once the conversion process began.

The Results: During GameTap’s pre-launch period we developed over 100 pieces of creative and scattered them across the web. This included MySpace pages, help wanted ads, blogs, banners and more. The 12 domains we created received over 274,000 visitors during this time. 15% of those visitors went through the Power Up server and were converted into leads.