Barbara Lippert's Critique: Wieden's Great Hoax

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Talk about your integrated branding and innovative use of media. “Beta-7” is an intricately layered, deliberately complicated piece of “live interactive theater” that played out in real time over the four months preceding the September launch of Sega’s ESPN NFL Football game.

Confused? Join the club. Disguised as one man’s anti-Sega crusade, it was in fact a marketing machine run with military precision and Swiss-like timing. The project involved three Web sites (the original, with posts from the campaign’s 24-hour-a-day protagonist, and the two real fan sites that sprung up), viral videos and voicemails, big-time commercials that aired on cable networks, tiny classified ads in places like The Onion, “physical stunting,” chat rooms, mail (beta copies of the game were sent to a few testers, then bogus legal letters demanded them back), massive e-mailings and flier distribution.

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