Nintendo of America’s Pokémon-TCG

Bottom line – most kids have the attention span of a peanut. So given the task of grabbing said attention of that particular demo, while staying within the lines of the Child Online Protection Act law, well, it can prove to be a real pickle. Richard Gallagher (designer) and Kele Nakamura (programming) at Vancouver’s Engine Digital came up with a simple and classic advergame campaign of ‘Connect the Dots’ to create buzz around a new line of Pokémon-TCG trading cards. Kids were invited to play via email and the game cleverly included a viral, send-to-a-friend feature and ran a month prior to the in-store release

in October.

www.enginedigital.com/projects.asp?id=52

GM Canada’s Cadillac STS

It’s humorous, it’s tongue in cheek – and not what you’d expect from the long-standing maker of luxury cars. But that’s what the GM Canada group was looking for in its ad campaign launch of the 2005 Cadillac STS. Part of an integrated campaign, three clever ‘self-help’ microsites (consumers were driven, so to speak, to the sites with a magazine layout and DM piece) claimed to help new Caddy owners deal with the stress of having everyone envy them for buying the new STS. A collaborative effort between GM Canada’s ad manager Fred Lautenschlager, Cadillac marketing manager Norm Sawula and Toronto’s MacLaren McCann, headed by group CD Chris Harrison, the microsite portion of the campaign was launched in September and will run until the end of the year.

www.cadillacstsenvy.com

Levi Strauss’ Personality Quiz

Take a look on the Net for various online quiz opps and quickly you’ll be hit with tests for ’emotional intelligence,’ ‘gender purity,’ ‘weight loss’ and the ever-popular ‘your body is not a carcass’ mind-tickler. Well it’s obvious Toronto creative agency henderson bas and the Levi Strauss marketing group would score high on an IQ test for their slick new Web campaign ‘The Levi’s Personality Test.’ Designed to get people thinking (and it’s doing just that with a 40+% conversion rate so far), the online personality test uses a series of fun and engaging questions to help guide the consumer to the pair of Levi jeans that might be right for them. This web execution, which was aimed at the ”young’ and, more importantly, ‘young-minded’ consumer was launched in mid-September and is still running.

www.levi.com/canada/en/profiler.asp