Engagement Marketing Japan Style: Snack brand Tohato creates a multiplayer online wargame

I need to do this quickly, and will return to this for more. But this is in my mind, the best example of everything about our blog. Its true engagement marketing. It is truly multiplatform. It brings a totally non-digital brand into the digital space and is fun, addictive, engaging and has a good mobile element to it as well. And it comes from Japan.

Tohato makes snacks. They have two popular brands of spicy snacks sold in small bags, similar to potato chips. They are "Habanero" and "Satan Jorquia".

So the campaign asked consumers to pick their favourite brand of snack, and join their "evil army" and enter the "World's Worst War" to go fight the other side. So if you liked Habanero, you would join the Habanero Evil Army. Or if you preferred Satan Jorquia, you would join their evil army.

To join - you had to buy a bag of the snacks, and enter the game using your mobile phone, via a 2D barcode printed on the bag. Then there were over 20 battlefields, where these two armies would do battle, and you would initially enter as a private in the army. But to use viral marketing methods - if you used your phone and recruited friends to join, then you would be promoted. And as your friends recruited friends to your side of the war, they too would be promoted, and you would be promoted higher still, in the Evil Army of your choice.

Then both sides would go online and do battle, in large masses. The game included things such as a 24 hour news service via the mobile phone, so who had died in battle, who had been promoted, which battlefield had been captured by which side, etc.

The game was developed by Japanese creative ad agency Hakuhodo and just won some big global advertising awards for best mobile campaign last week. I will dig more into this (the images are cool, the whole thing is so much exactly of the style, that my nephews who are into multiplayer gaming, would love it..)  My thanks to David Wheldon of Vodafone who brought this to my attention after it won the award. And so if this is how Japan deals with Generation C and their love of virtual worlds and multiplayer online fantasy games, then when do we see the first Western company do the same? The Cola Wars? Coke vs Diet Coke? Sign up now!

UPDATE - I have much more on this story including some pictures, please follow it here: Getting Deeper into Tohato's Snack Food Wargame