Sprite has checked into the Habbo Hotel (www.habbohotel.ca) and set up its animated spokesdude Mr. Thirst to run the virtual hotel’s nightclub – now dubbed Club Thirst – for 26 weeks. The soft drink brand gets promotional billboard ads on the site’s main pages and within the nightclub as well as listings on the hotel’s navigation pages.
Habbo Hotel, a virtual online chat community, is targeted to 13- to 20-year-olds as a fun place to meet and interact with friends. Registered players choose to be represented in the action with a personalized figure called a Habbo. The hotel was launched last June by MuchMusic and CHUM Television Interactive in partnership with Sulake Canada, a subsidiary of Sulake Labs of Helsinki, Finland. It’s patrolled 24 hours a day by volunteer hotel guides supervised by Sulake Canada employees, and every conversation is filtered before it appears on the screen.
Within the nightclub – consisting of two lounges, the Lemon Lounge and the Lime Lounge – visitors can ask for a drink and they will get a Sprite-related reply such as: ‘May I offer you a Sprite?’ The next element of the sponsorship will have Mr. Thirst opening his virtual penthouse suite to Habbos and giving them a code word that can be redeemed for Habbo points. Habbo points allow players to do things like buy furniture for their personal suite or dive off the diving board at the hotel’s pool.
Many of MuchMusic’s teen-targeted promotions spill over to Habbo Hotel including those for another major presence on the site, Gillette, which is currently doing a promotion across all of the properties for TAG body spray for men.
