Digital Leadership Group Blog

What an intriguing couple of weeks for Hasbro it has been. The learning they have gained during this time is more than most brands would gain in a lifetime of interactive marketing.

Hasbro launched on September 11^th a massive multi-player online version of its popular board game Monopoly called Monopoly City Streets. This brand participation program uses Google Maps or Open Street Map as the “board”. Hasbro in the pre campaign promotion dubbed it “this will be the biggest game of Monopoly of all time” and said it would allow gamers to buy “any street in the world.”

On registering to the program you goal is simple, become the richest property magnate in the world! Players start with 3 million Monopoly dollars. When you start it seems very tempting to go looking and buying and owning the very street you live on. Then your friends’ streets, your neighbourhood, your town, the world. Well that’s what I have tried to do! You can own any street across the globe. Build humble houses or spend more money and put skyscrapers on streets. You must check out how College Hill looks in this virtual world.  You have to be clever and sabotage your friends before they know what’s hit them. I don’t epxect to own my streets for very long.

Once players own the land, they can build buildings that will generate rent income. Those buildings sit right on the map, making it possible to erect a skyscraper where your neighbor’s house used to be. This is where the social side of the game comes into play. Players can sell and trade their properties amongst themselves.

Chance cards are here in the virtual game as well and allow players to sabotage their neighbours’ property by building wind farms, prisons or garbage tips on their own property. This reduces the value of the neighbour’s property. Like the real world board game version the game is very addictive and fun.

I truely admire Hasbro and their agency Tribal DDB London for this idea. This is a follow up to the 2005 Monopoly Live campaign that won a Gold Media Lion and was Runner-up for the Titanium Lion in Canne in 2006.  The Monopoly Live version of the game used real taxi cabs fitted with GPS driving around the streets of London to create the biggest version of the game ever played. You registered at the website and while mostly automated was a huge campaign event. Hasbro has been using innovation in marketing for a few years now.

Back to Monopoly City Streets the enthusiasm for the new camapign in the first twenty four hours was even more overwhelming then expected. It’s being talked about all over Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social networks. The game even has a dedicated blog of its own, which stated that initial statistics show 1.7 million unique visitors to the gaming site on the first day.

But building an online empire doesn’t always come easy and challenges will always arise when you have a lot of particpation. When the game was launched the massive influx of players caused the servers to crash. And that’s when the griping began with the game players. Many users called for a reset, complaining that players on opening day were given an unfair advantage and choice properties were already taken. Sorry I couldn’t help it

In fact, so high was demand that the result was, in Hasbro’s words, ‘compromised data’ on its servers – the consequence of which is a total reset of the servers was required one week into the campaign. So last Friday just gone a reset took place and all players previous data was wiped, allowing all to start from a clean slate. Previous users will have to re-register. The downtime also allowed for some improvements to be implemented, addressing many of the bugs users had reported in the early phase.

Any as I said it’s interesting times when you create a real-time, engaging and involving brand program as you need to respond, adjust and participate alongside your customers twenty four seven. I wish Hasbro and Tribal DDB London all the best for the remaining four months of the campaign. As always the future belongs to the brave.

http://www.monopolycitystreets.com

Author: Adam Good, Clemenger Group