He’s all over Canada encased in billboard cages, extolling the virtues of contract-free wrestling matches, and now Canadians can get a little El Tabador action themselves in a new YouTube game by Koodo.
The goal of the game was to take El Tabador from his mass-media perch (in a Media Experts-handled campaign, running now) and put him in the hands of their primary target demo, 18- to 25-year-olds, Steve Waugh, account manager, Taxi 2, tells MiC. ‘We’re using the online space for the brand engagement aspect of Koodo.’
The game appears on the brand’s YouTube channel and allows the visitor to ‘become’ El Tabador as he takes on ‘Bloatimus Contractimus.’ When the visitor presses play, he or she takes on the point of view of El Tabador and then selects the moves they want him to perform against Bloatimus. After giving him a beat-down – and taking a few hits of their own – they can ‘finish him’ and win the game (and, presumably, the war against cellphone contacts).
The game, called ‘Get in the Ring,’ was conceived and designed to build on the success of Koodo’s Christmas YouTube game ‘Sugar Streak,’ featuring the former brand spokes-cookie, the Gingerbread Man. In the game, users chose the next move the Gingerbread Man would make as he raced through downtown Toronto in the live-action video. The game garnered over a million views on the channel, Waugh says, and so the brand ‘wanted to take it to the next level’ with El Tabador.
‘We wanted to use a similar technology [to ‘Sugar Streak’],’ he explains. ‘This is new within YouTube, and having a younger demographic for Koodo, those are the kinds of things that our consumers appreciate.’
The game is housed within the channel banner on the page, a strategy Taxi 2 developed with YouTube. Unlike ‘Sugar Streak,’ where the user had to upload new videos each time they made a decision on what way the Gingerbread Man should go, the action for ‘Get in the Ring’ all takes place within the same video player.
California-based The Viral Factory is handling promotions, seeding the game across the web on targeted blogs and websites, Waugh says.
