Subscribers

When I see a tv commercial solely promoting me to go online for some interactive experience, I almost always check it out because I am always looking for great interactive campaigns. Moutain Dew has a new commercial out pushing folks to Dewmocracy.com.

The commercial is pretty intensive, action-oriented and looks like it cost a bundle to film. Anyone spending that kind of money to push people online gets my interest. The idea behind the campaign is to help create the next Mountain Dew including the flavor, color, name, logo, label, and tagline. Sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately even though they’ve likely spent more money creating the website than the tv commercial (which says a lot), they really fall short on a few things.

The user experience is lousy right down to have white type in yellow fields as you try to register. Have you tried reading white on yellow? Yup – you can’t see it to know if you actually typed anything correctly. I then had several other bizzare user experiences. When I selected my country as Canada, it automatically refreshed and provided me an error message that I had not identified my province. Of course not – hadn’t got there yet! Province came after country on this form. Once I finished registering (leaving the pre-checked box to receive some updates on the contest) the thank you page confirmed for me that I had confirmed no email subscriptions (pardon?). I went back to check and yup, the box was still ticked, so who knows if I am signed up or not. I then got an additional “information profiling” page which asked me to provide an alternate email address. Hey wait a minute – I already gave you one, why do I need to give you two? Apparently, they say it’s in case the first email address I gave them was incorrect in any way they could make sure I still get the newsletters I subscribed to (wait, I thought they just said I hadn’t subscribed to any?)

Registration finally complete, I log in and get to view the longer version of the movie which is pretty cool from an action standpoint I must admit, until you hit the cheesy ending where the token native guy tells you, “You are the chosen one” and finishes with you replicating a Nestea commercial ending in my opinion.

On to the game itself. Well let’s just say I didn’t get very far and gave up. Now when I say didn’t get very far, well I was on the site for a good 40 minutes with my frustration growing each minute. And I was still only in the first chamber of 7!

Here’s the objective and overview right from the site itself:
Your journey will take you through seven Chambers, where you will meet mythical characters, answer questions, and play games.
Upon entering each Chamber, you will be tasked to create a specific feature of the next Mountain Dew. For example, in the first Chamber, you will select your Drink’s flavor.
Creating the individual features of your Drink will be the first task of each Chamber. Once completed, you can wait for the next Chamber to open or can continue exploring the world of DEWmocracy by playing a series of games.
Your decisions in the first three Chambers will lead you to join 1 of the 3 Teams that will ultimately create the next Mountain Dew. After the 3 most popular combinations of features are determined, you’ll be aligned with the Team whose drink most closely matches your own.
Once aligned with a Team, you will be responsible for creating the logo, label, and ultimately the tag-line of the next Mountain Dew. Each Team will vote on which Drink candidate from those submitted by all Team members will be put forth for a national vote.
Points earned in the game get you higher visibility for your drink, increasing its chances of being selected as your Team’s candidate. Accruing the most points does not directly result in your drink being one of the 3 final selections.
In the final Chamber, your team will vote to determine the Drink candidate that you collectively would like to bring into the real world.

I never got out of the first chamber, several (pointless) games and a lousy navigation experience frustrrated me beyond no end. If I finished a game and was trying to complete another task, but accidently clicked on the game again, when I chose to go back or end the game (since I’d already played it), I lost all the points I’d accumulated playing the game in the first place. How was that fair?

Overall, I think the premise is interesting, the graphics are amazing and this must have been one hell of a thing to program – credit where credit is due.

However, there definitely wasn’t enough thought put into user experience, connection of the games to the storyline or QA. Yes you can log in and go back and play the game more later, making this somewhat like an RPG game, which again is kind of cool for those into such games. The problem is it seems like it is going to be something you would have to play for hours on end to actually finish entering the contest and help make the next Mountain Dew.

Maybe that was the objective, find a way to limit the number of entries. If so, they’ve done it in spades. If the objective was to create a fun, creative, engaging and interactive way to enter the contest, they somewat missed the mark. While the idea is creative and definitely interactive to the max… The fun (at least for me) goes out the window with each user experience gaf that occurs and honestly the length of time it took to get pretty much nowhere with fairly pointless games.

I do have to mention one other cool thing though – the loading graphic is in the shape of a Mountain Dew bottle. I thought that was clever.

Final thoughts – it is obvious that the folks at Pepsi spent a lot of money on this and are serious about interactive for all of their brands. Unfortunately it’s a bit too much flair and not enough focus on the things that make people feel they’ve had the best interactive experience with your brand.