Have you heard of Cards Against Humanity? It’s much like Apples to Apples, but where the object of the game is to come up with the funniest most horrible phrase possible by filling in the blank or answering a random question. The self-described “party game for horrible people” would make a great gift, but it’s such a small company that it has to use creative ways to advertise during the holiday season. The game was crowd-funded on Kickstarter in 2011 and is technically free since it’s licensed under creative commons and can be downloaded to print. Cards Against Humanity (CAH) has used alternate reality games (ARG) to engage its consumers over the holidays for the past few years. “Alternate Reality Games take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world” (Martin, Thompson, & Chatfield, 2006, p.6).
Last year, Santa took a vacation and left it in CAH’s hands to give gifts on the 12 Days of Christmas. For $12, participants were sent 12 random gifts, including customized packs of cards and a lump of coal. There were secret cards hidden in the lining of the packaging, and a mysterious game called “Holiday [BS]” with hidden clues to a complicated puzzle that customers work for months to figure out on Reddit. The first person or group to submit the correct answer gets a prize. CAH shared a blog post breaking down the solution to the 2013 campaign’s puzzle, which ended up being the Black and White card pairing: But Before I Kill You Mr. Bond I Must Show You ________; The True Meaning Of Christmas.
This year, CAH killed Santa, and decided to launch another season of Holiday BS with a video of the funeral. For the “10 Days (or whatever) of Kwanza” campaign, $15 gets participants 10 gifts randomly delivered in December.
According to The Economist, more brands are beginning to use “Alternate reality” games to engage their audiences with puzzles weaved into a storyline told via both tangible and online platforms (Technology and society, 2009). This is a natural progression for a game company like CAH, but there have also been massive successes with movie releases, retail product launches, and fast food chain promotion. I think that this kind of quest is the future of content marketing to entertain consumers. There’s nothing like a puzzle to become top-of-mind. The CAH campaign is well integrated across its website, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Reddit, with a consistently snarky tone, much of the same content including the video of Santa’s funeral shared across platforms, and heavy use of user-generated content, particularly on Reddit and Twitter.
Once December hits CAH has promised to guide the players with additional hints, and I have no doubt that once the gifts are sent across North America in perfect synchronization, Twitter page will buzz with mentions of @CAH as consumers react to their gifts. This level of engagement will drive even further brand awareness and web traffic around CAH online. Offline, as players are “gifted” increasingly weird card decks, they’ll whip the game out at more holiday parties with friends and family, thus spreading the word about CAH even further. It’s a brilliant model and an exciting approach to marketing that is differentiating Cards Against Humanity from the saturation of advertising that much bigger companies are promoting this holiday shopping season.
The first time I played Cards Against Humanity was with a group of strangers at a B&B cabin in West Virginia. Have you played? How do you think this kind of ARG quest affects consumer-generated content integration and word of mouth marketing?
References:
Technology and society: “Alternate reality” games mixing puzzles and plot lines, online and off, are becoming more popular. The Economist. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/node/13174355
Martin, A., Thompson, B., & Chatfield, T. (2006). 2006 alternate reality games [white paper]. Retrieved from https://archives.igda.org/arg/resources/IGDA-AlternateRealityGames-Whitepaper-2006.pdf
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