Ahead of the selling game

By IRENE CHAPPLE

A New Zealand-made virtual game which has won a truckload of direct advertising awards is likely to be adopted by international promoters.

The online game was created by direct advertising agency Aim Proximity to promote Air New Zealand's sponsorship of the provincial rugby championships.

Last Friday, it won the RSVP Grand Prix and four gold medals at the Direct Marketing Awards, accolades which top 18 months of an increasingly successful campaign.

Since its launch, Virtual NPC has broken records for online gaming participation and been named most popular sporting website in the country by Hitwise.

To compete, players log on to the website and predict scores and margins for coming matches.

An overall prize of $10,000 of travel with Air New Zealand is backed up by air points promotion and spot prizes.

Previous seasons have attracted such players as sports journalists Tony Johnson, Phil Gifford and Clint Brown, but the phenomenal success of the latest game is being attributed largely to a campaign that works through a mates-to-mates system.

The latest games have allowed people to log in and get a "mates list" where they can check the scores of friends and family.

In the 2002 season, 16,000 new players signed on after 43,000 emails were sent out from registered entrants. That pulled the total number of players up to 67,000, three times the number of the previous year.

About 50,000 used the friends system, and 7.4 "mates" were marked for each player.

Clint Bratton, e-marketing consultant at Aim Proximity, says the mates system gave players the incentives for one-upmanship.

"It is something we have enhanced over the last three campaigns. We have built a search function around this so it is easier to find friends and family, we have built a message board so you can send short messages to them ... that sort of thing keeps people in the game."

Bratton, who is from Hamilton and goes by the online name of Mooloo Man, finds the mates system particularly competitive. Friends, he says, are ecstatic to beat the man who was involved in the product's creation.

Other initiatives have made the game increasingly user-friendly, including being able to log in and receive information via text messages to a mobile.

The concept can be transferred to other games, such as cricket, but Bratton says Aim Proximity's clients need to give permission before it is used beyond NPC.

However, discussions are well advanced for the game's export. Australian and European sporting bodies such as the AFL are understood to be interested in using the marketing tool for their sports seasons.

Negotiations are expected to be finalised within a couple of months.

If it were used overseas or for other sports - or even sharemarket games - Aim Proximity would simply refine its existing generic computer programme.

Bratton says the game's popularity has given it a life of its own.

"It's a nice simple format that has shown the genuine passion New Zealanders still have for rugby .th.th. only you don't have to go to a game. People can play it at work th.th.th. people stand around over coffee in the morning and talk about virtual rugby."

Aim Proximity, which also won the Direct Marketing Awards' second major prize, the Supreme Nexus, appears to have cemented its dominance in the industry.

At the Direct Marketing Association awards in 2001, its sweep of the awards raised questions among some disgruntled agencies over the validity of the judging.

The Direct Marketing Association responded by auditing the process, leading to some changes for this year's awards.

Aim Proximity's second sweep of the major awards has the dissenting agencies chuckling.

Wow Rapp Collins' managing partner Richard Bleasdale, who did not enter his agency's work this year because of dissatisfaction with the DMA, said the results were interesting. He said his agency was now quite happy with the judging process and Aim Proximity had deserved the wins. "However, it did make me smile."