Thermasilk has done the impossible — give girls the ability to create her perfect guy. In a sponsorship of virtual teen community Habbo Hotel Canada, the hair care brand has created the ‘Hit on My Hot Guy’ room within the hotel to target the 52% teen female demo inhabiting the hotel. Within the Thermasilk room is a branded billboard with links leading to the www.hitonmyhotguy.ca site.
And the room even has its own brand reps. Pre-programmed bots respond to user questions with branded responses such as: ‘Have a drink and hit on a hot guy! Click on the billboard for a chance to win!’ The site created for the promo is a destination for teens to virtually build a perfect guy, choosing hair, clothes, and tattoos, among others and then emailing this piece of perfection to friends to increase chances of winning swag — including free ring tones from MuchMusic. An in-game competition links users back to the hotel encouraging teens to get other Habbos (avatars ‘living’ in the hotel) to rate their hot guy for a chance to win game credits. To further support the promo, MuchMusic is airing two 15-second spots to drive traffic to the site starting on October 21. The media agency that did the magic? PHD Canada.
Seems Thermasilk isn’t the only action at Habbo Hotel Canada. If the folks running the site had their way, Halloween would be rebranded ‘Habboween.’ The two-week promo launching Oct. 14 until Oct. 31 entices teens to furnish their virtual rooms within the hotel with ‘rare items’ — virtual merchandise only available for two weeks. For Habboween, these items include skeletons, pumpkins and cobwebs, all bought online with credits and used in a competition with other Habbos for the best room. Allan Best, country manager for Sulake Canada, the company that runs Habbo says: ‘Roughly half of our revenue comes from the sale of rare items, with the other half coming from sponsorship.’
And just announced today, Habbo has teamed up with Nokia to launch Habbo Islands, the first mobile game created to connect to the hotel community. Habbo Islands is a single player adventure world where players are able to connect with pals in the Habbo Hotel via a console. The game is exclusive to Nokia’s N-Gage platform, a mobile game deck. It should be in consumer hands by the second half of 2006.
Habbo Hotels are worldwide with 16 versions in countries such as the U.K., the U.S. and Spain. Habbo boasts 4.4 million unique visitors per month globally. Last year’s Habboween numbers showed 11,047 entries for the competition and under 150,000 unique visitors that month — all after the three months that Habbo Hotel Canada had been up and running. Says Best: ‘In Canada, it’s now as high as 320,000 unique visitors a month, so it will be interesting to see if our entries effectively double.’ Habbo Hotels target teens 13-16, with 89% of the site’s growth happening through viral means.
