Lose Your Anger

MGOMD identified that the 20-something audience was a key market for Virgin Money online that other financial companies were finding it hard to contact. Media profiling revealed that these consumers are heavy users of online gaming, and respond well to brands that develop good quality advergames.

In addition, OMD, Yahoo and Skive had recently completed 'Game On' — the first in-depth research looking at how gaming affects perception towards a brand, and how to make advergaming appeal to a specific audience.

The main objective was to build awareness of Virgin Money as a challenger brand within the financial services sector by developing an online game targeting 20-30 year olds dissatisfied with their bank and heavy users of online media. Skive was commissioned by Tweed London.

Skive made a conscious effort to disguise the fact that the game was branded, giving it a purposefully rawer, underground look and feel to most financial services advertising, and focusing on playability and simple gameplay rather than forcing a product message on the customer. Tweed provided three tracks by unsigned bands sourced from myspace.com for audio, a media first.

The idea is to take a wrecking ball and having named your bank literally create your own 'hole in the wall', before the strapline 'Anger Management from Virgin Money' is revealed. The execution sat on a specially registered URL.

The design was purposefully rawer than normal financial services advertising to give it an underground feel and appeal to the gaming audience.

An MSN Messenger Theme Pack followed after a synergy between online gaming, the instant messenger audience, and Virgin Money’s target audience was identified.

A second game, Lose Your Lunch Hour, was released at the start of the year.

The game was released to trade, financial and music press, as well as influential gaming blogs. Paid for media did not start for 6 weeks, allow the game to develop its own organic seeding.

The success of this campaign was based on brand exposure and game plays.

The game received coverage in four national press titles, including the front page of Money Guardian. There was substantial regional press coverage, and blogs carried the game as well.

The organic approach to seeding proved a success, with the game picked up by major gaming sites such as addictinggames.com. Since launch, the games has had 3,203,721 plays from 1,535,193 unique users.