The Ex Files

Hell Cuts of the Army

“Hell, Yes, We Will Go... shave our heads for a free video game!" That was the public’s response to Ubisoft and a promotion for the game publisher's Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. 

For the first phase of the game’s launch, New York agency Renegade Marketing sent troops to Seattle’s Penny Arcade Expo (PAX)  Aug. 29-31 and set up a bootcamp barbershop. The payoff for enduring a "Hell Cut," a military style buzz cut topped off with the word “Hell” spray-painted onto the back of one’s scalp? No, Ubisoft wasn’t offering to pony up college tuition, but recruits were promised free copies of the $60 game, which comes out Sept. 23. The ploy worked: 150 soldiers lined up and signed up for a cut. Another 500 opted for one of the booth’s airbrush tattoos.

“We gave people buzz cuts from Friday through Sunday night--we went non-stop and did as many as we could--sometimes the line was three hours long,” said Renegade president/CEO Drew Neisser. “We wanted to make sure everyone at that show was aware of that game.”

Judging from the prime real estate that the stunt garnered on Gamespot’s home page and blatherings at more than two dozen gamer blogs, mission accomplished.

Phase two, deployed last week, involves what Ubisoft hopes will become a viral video. An email, initially mailed to friends and bloggers, directs the recipient to the Enlist4Hell Web site, where the visitor is berated by an officer in a recruitment video. (The sender can customize with personal photos and facts so that the insults directed at the spineless little maggot are spot-on.) “Inductees” can then pre-order the game at the site, and forward customized versions to insult their friends to recruit them to join the squad.

Hell's Highway is the third entry in the Brothers in Arms shooter series developed by Gearbox Software. The World War II action video game targets grown up gamers and will be released on Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 3 platforms.

Takin' Care of Buseyness

Sometimes, the medium is the message, and other times the medium is the messed celeb. The latter is the strategy entrepreneurial phone company GotVMail took when it hired Gary Busey as its viral messenger for a series of 40 or so ads that hit the Web this week.

The “Gary Busey on Business” campaign features the star of The Buddy Holly Story, whose promising career was later usurped by a motorcycle crash, drug addiction, loads of erratic behavior (according to one gossip blog, he insists on paying for all store purchases in doubloons) and various Jesus and reality show redemptions. In the vids, it is Busey 2.0 who blathers about business and pretty much anything else he wants, including hybrids and homework, and ties them into the entrepreneurial message.

Ads were created in house by GotVMail, which offers Web-based phone systems with multiple lines, hold music, forwarding and other services to make small businesses sound like professional firms starting at $9.95 a month.

Busey was chosen for his fortuitous name and knack for providing unintentional humor. “Our mascot’s name is Gary,” said CEO Siamak Taghaddos, who also liked Busey’s lack of business acumen. “He doesn’t know anything about business. He has no idea what he’s talking about.”

In addition to visiting a homepage on YouTube, fans of the work can go to GaryBuseyonbusiness.com to learn about the service, view clips and download a widget that they can host on their blogs and whatnot. The campaign will also have a page presence at MySpace and other social networking sites.

Meow Mix: Match & Make a Million

To find the Brett Somers-Charles Nelson Reilly of human-cat coupledom, Del Monte’s Meow Mix is holding a mobile tour that could culminate in a $1 million match game airing on GSN this fall.

The “Think Like a Cat” campaign was created by multi-disciplined agency TracyLocke, Dallas, and kicked off the first of eight mobile tour stops June 14 in Chicago. At audition events, pet owners test their knowledge of cats in general and their pet specifically, and take headshots and screen tests with their beloved furballs. Local radio station talent will be on hand to broadcast the activities and give out Meow Mix samples and swag.

There will be account-specific executions in retail chains such as Petco and Publix. Other stops: New York, Tampa,  Dallas, Denver, San Francisco and Portland, Ore. The tour concludes in Los Angeles on Aug. 3.

Media support for “Think Like a Cat” will include broadcast, print, radio and digital marketing. Last year, pet owners were taught how to "Think Like A Cat" via the Meow Mix “Acatemy.”

Agency.com developed www.meowmix.com and its quiz show microsite with games, audition tour clips, cat facts and informative vignettes. Meow Mix “parents” can share the site with friends, play games and vote on their favorite clip. The winning one will be featured on GSN Live.

Eight kitty/parent teams cast from the auditions will compete on the 30-minute game show, which airs on GSN on Nov. 15. Newlywed Game-esque rounds of competition include "How well do you know your cat?" and "Fun partner activity." Yeah, it's all "fun" and game shows until somebody loses an eye...

Hard out Here for a Stumping Chimp

If you thought you glimpsed a hedgehog on camera at a presidential primary or, ahem, caucus, odds are it wasn’t porn star Ron Jeremy. A soon-to-debut video game has been sending people in animal costumes around to campaign hot zones as a marketing stunt.

Hail to the Chimp, a nonpartisan video game that aims to drive voter registration and engage players in the political process (oh, and move units), stars among other critters Crackers the monkey, who, naturally, shares a striking resemblance to the primate who’s the current lame duck. So, as the 2008 voting got under way, game characters got their own 24-hour cable (Web, actually) news network called GRRNews and a white news van with which to roam the nation. They hit the campaign trail, and camped out with CNN, FOX and all the other press outlets.

Now, at GRRNews.com and election offshoot www.cockthevote.us (the logo is a red, white and blue chicken head), anchor Woodchuck Chumley introduces footage of furries out and about on the presidential campaign trail as Crackers and crew crash the primaries to catch John Edwards and Ron Paul speeches and conduct man-on-the-street interviews with various candidates’ supporters. The “reel” intersperses campaign footage with action from the presidential party game, which was created by video game visionary Alex Seropian (Halo).

In Hail to the Chimp, 10 animal candidates compete for the title of President of the Animals in a flawed election process complete with familiar characters such as fundraising fat cats and pontificating pundits. Ad spoofs were created by writers for Comedy Central and The Onion. The game is for the Xbox 360 and PS3 systems.

To support the game’s June 24 launch, publisher Gamecock Media and developer Wideload Games will launch an ad campaign on Comedy Central. The online marketing materials also support a voter drive: Cock the Vote links to Rock the Vote’s registration page.

Philly Teaser Stakes

When the public response to your marketing effort is, “WTF?” it generally means you’ve wasted your wad on some wannabe-Fellini creative director. But getting people to ponder is the point of The Franklin Institute of Science's rebranding effort.

Agency Red Tettemer, Philadelphia, created the “Curious?”-tagged experiential program for the Philly museum to coincide with a logo change and shortened moniker (to The Franklin, or TF if you’re hasty). Artful elements around town and TV/print/Web media emphasize the mysterious mark as a playful, engaging driver for learning.

The squiggly serves as the Waldo’s striped shirt of the campaign by popping up at such city sites as LOVE Park (home of Robert Indiana’s pop art  “Love” sculpture) and Rittenhouse Square during the three-week stunt. It's shaved into the head of an individual who roams public spaces by day and projected onto buildings at night. Activities are being filmed so they will get a second life online.

Last Saturday, the question-coiffed man invaded Rittenhouse Square. A dog walker wearing a “Curious?” T-shirt and accompanied by a “?”-painted pup also strutted around the park, where the grass was tinted with the punctuation symbols. At other locations, stunty flash mobs formed to stare up at the sky and dispense “Curious?” postage-paid postcards to passersby. The scribbles and sketches that are solicited will be showcased at a microsite.

Things got curiouser and curiouser on Sunday. Shaved head guy and the dog were back, and joining them in the park were large, question-mark-shaped grass mounds. So were hidden, motion-activated switches that prompted voices to whisper “Curious?” to visitors who tripped them. "Shaking blobs" emblazoned with “Curious?” also inhabited the habitat.

On Thursday, a posse of painters will set up their easels in Rittenhouse Square and paint black question marks on their canvases. Everything is intended to drive curious consumers to www.curioustf.org and, duh, the museum.

To Live and Diebold in L.A., N.Y.

Still can't shake that hanging-chad envy? HBO Films is dragging a dozen of those Florida voting booths that starred in the 2000 president election to L.A. and N.Y. There, the people can punch the chad out of butterfly ballots to see if the low-tech system would have voided their votes.

The one-day event--on a Tuesday (5/20), natch--promotes "Recount," the HBO film that recounts the state's controversial role in the Bush vs. Gore race that was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.

People who visit Recount Polling Stations in Union Square (N.Y.) and The Grove (L.A.) can cast their votes Fla.-style on a 2000 ballot using an authentic Florida Votomatic (It slices! It dices!) booth and ballot box, and will get a set of "Recount" trading cards featuring the cast (Kevin Spacey, Laura Dern, Denis Leary) for doing their civic duty.  (On that note, Civic Entertainment Group, N.Y., is the agency.) The film premieres on HBO on May 25.

What Elena Said!

Here's what Panasonic and agency Renegade, N.Y., have been up to. I'd write a story for Ex Files, but our Web editor beat me to it! Becky ([email protected])

Pork, Beans & Rock 'n' Roll

Food fight!

The band Weezer is engaging fans in a virtual food fight at music community Buzznet to promote a new single called "Pork and Beans."

Users start slinging the sludge by visiting www.buzznet.com/cp/weezerfoodfight, where they get a code that they can paste into their friends’ Notes section on Buzznet. What results is a smattering of splatterings, which the page owner and visitors can view. Pork and beans haven't received a musical tribute of this magnitude since The Who's  Tommy.

The more notes that are left for a person, the more dense the pile of porky badness becomes. Fans can also invite friends to join the food fight by sending them the invitation link.

Up With Bottoms!

Blame Seinfeld episode 155 if you wish, because ever since it aired, "muffin tops" have been viewed as the icing on the cake (and we don't mean the type that results from ladies squeezing their trunk junk into too-tight, low-rise jeans).

To advertise its new muffin tops, Bloom supermarkets and ad agency BooneOakley, Charlotte, N.C., are staging a fake protest this month in which a quartet of human-sized, headless, jealous muffin bottoms retaliate via three-hour store picketing stunts, charged fliers, crudely "defaced" Bloom billboards and videos that can be viewed at www.crumbworldwide.org. The fauxtest publicizes the evolution of Bloom's longtime signature product, the Blueberry Jumbo Muffin, to Bloomberry Muffin Tops. The Coalition of Really United Muffin Bottoms (aka CRUMB), also have a dedicated MySpace page. Bloom is a division of Food Lion.

Sexman, Meet the Love Guru...

Meet the new David Manning! Web 2.0 has its very own earnest, excitable movie critic, and he absolutely gushes about The Love Guru!

If you're not familiar with "Sexman," he makes video film reviews from his bedroom--or, at least, somebody's as the backdrop usually involves an unmade bed. He posts them on YouTube, where he gets heckled by anonymous message board types, and thus increases his page views (and prominence). His more notable "critiques" include Rambo ("It had a lot of heads gettin' blown off, and there was a lot of blood and violence--it was great! Five out of five stars!") and 10000 B.C. ("I didn't even notice that there weren't any swears because it was that good of a film.")

And now, he's got a few words to say about the Paramount/Mike Myers flick, which hits multiplexes on June 20. "It really looks like it's actually gonna be good!" the kid offers up in response to watching the trailer on YT. Did the studio rope him in to the viral campaign (that would be kinda genius), or is it just the beneficiary of a serendipitous Sexman plug? You decide! The review has been up for a week and has about 10,000 views.