The Crazy Sleigh Series

Comet Group PLC

Go for points to claim the prize

Genre: Action Adventure
Released: 2003

Hark, the flying elves do sing, see the presents that they bring...

As one of the UK's leading retailers Comet's website was amongst the top five most frequently visited e-commerce sites in the UK at the time of these campaigns. In 2003 they approached 4T2 to create an animated Christmas card they could send out to their email list. Instead, we convinced them that a game would deliver better results and Crazy Sleigh was created (massive respect to a lady called Sam Bain for taking this risk and believing in us). The campaign involved training "Comet the reindeer" on the finer techniques of sleigh flying. The game paid for itself via the direct sales of the advertised gifts within one week of launch. In 2003 most third party websites linked out to games as opposed to embedding them. Therefore the majority of the 750,000 plays that took place in the three week build up to Christmas that year, were on the Comet website. Back then, our clients referred to someone placing 'their' game on someone else's site as 'bandwidth theft'! The game was also number one on the Lycos Viral Chart over Christmas but we never figured out how they tracked this. These days tracking inside the game powers listings such as ViralChart.com, so they are actually based on some form of numeric data! In 2004 we followed this campaign with Crazy Sleigh II and received similar results. This version prompted players to purchase goods to unlock a bonus level, giving Comet's customers more of a chance to win the accompanying competition. We had no idea if this strategy would work, as to the best of our knowledge, no one had tried it before. By 2005 Comet's online marketing team had all taken positions with new companies and Crazy sleigh III was never commissioned. Crazy Sleigh I was featued on the Channel Four Games website homepage in December 2007, four years after it was born!



The results from this campaign were better than we could ever had imagined. We will definitely be working with 4T2 again in the near future!

Heidi Edmunds
Senior Marketing Manager


More games with funny songs in the intros please!

Mike Hawkyard
Singer

THE CHALLENGE

  • Encourage people to shop online at Comet
  • Convince client advergames were a real marketing tool
  • Think of a clever name for the reindeer in the game

THE RESULTS

  • 750,000 visits in three weeks
  • Still popular in 2007, four years later
  • Featured in 23 newspapers and magazines