Hancock 'Whale Toss'

Skive helped client MSN win a Pan European digital media brief from OMD for Sony Pictures to promote the release of summer blockbuster 'Hancock', starring Will Smith.

The film depicts a hard-living superhero who's fallen out of favour with the public, who's trying to repair his tarnished image. It's targeted at general cinema goers aged 13-35, with a slight male bias.

One of the challenges was to differentiate the release from other Superhero and fantasy big summer features, such as The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Night, Prince Caspian and The Mummy 3.

Sony wanted to position Hancock as the must-see Summer Blockbuster, raise awareness and make people talk about the movie.

Skive works with MSN to help leverage the platform’s digital solutions (Specials Pages, Messenger theme packs, peer-to-peer games and Windows Live Agents).

Of the many potential creative executions proposed, the chosen route was 'Whale Toss' — a peer-to-peer game played within Windows Live Messenger inspired by a memorable moment in the film's trailer in which Hancock hurls a beached whale back into the ocean — only for it to sink a boat.

This concept was refined so that the game was single player, but played within rich media MPUs and expandable 234x60s across the MSN network, as well as on a standalone page that was hosted by MSN for people who forward it on to friends.

The game was deliberately simple 'point-and-click', with users choosing the power and direction of Hancock's throw, which must miss the boats on the horizon for more points to be scored. The user has three attempts, before being prompted to submit their score into the high score table, play the game again or watch the trailer.

Skive used the trailer assets, adding sand effects and seamlessly merging the film's CGI whale with our own specially modelled version as it sails over the sea.

The game was served by Eyeblaster and was featured on its Creative Showcase.

The campaign ran on MSN Messenger and MSN Homepages between June and August 2008 across Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy, the UK and France, and additional markets subsequently requested it.

The average user-initiated expansion rate was 6.35%, but in some markets this went as high as over 60%.

The average duration of expansion was 2.8 minutes, but in some markets this went as high as over 5 minutes.