Fanta has just announced the launch of a new mobile game (via New Media Age), which sounds quite groovy, but with an important dash of pure genius.
The basic game is virtual tennis, played via Bluetooth and consumers can print out a real court from the Fanta website. That’s the groovy part – appealing to to their youthful target market’s love of gaming, their addiction to doing cool stuff over Bluetooth and all things mobile – especially new stuff.
The genius part is that the game sounds are generated at very high-pitched frequencies (sometimes called Mosquito), meaning that are generally only audible to the under 20’s. Yes, that means that you probably can’t hear them at all.
The inspiration almost certainly comes comes from the story about an alarm company who started to use the frequency to disperse kids hanging around shops. In fact, they simply recorded the sounds and made them into ringtones inaudible to adults, including their teachers and parents. My, how they laughed when they could call each other in classes without their teachers hearing.
Congrats to both Coca-Cola and Ogilvy, the team behind the campaign, who have both been at the forefront of mobile innovation and continue to push the barriers at a time when too many agencies are still saying “Well, if I don’t surf the mobile web/play games on my phone/click on mobile ads, no one does”.
Did they learn nothing from the first digital revolution?
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Hi Russell,
Thanks for the post. We are so happy with the creative idea behind this work.
I have to make a correction please – We made the Fanta Stealth Sound System. Which is a communicator application that only teens can hear.
Its a java based app that they can use to communicate ‘hello, goodbye, warning’ etc via their mobile speaker and only they will hear it, even in a room full of adults.
Please go to fanta.msite.tv on your mobile to get it and find out more!
Thanks again,
Scott Seaborn
Hi Russell and readers of MobHappy
Brilliant idea and boy does it make me as a 48 year old feel really REALLY old ha-ha…
Also from the comments section, Scott – congratulations, great idea indeed.
I blogged about it at both of my blogs, Communities Dominate blogs, and 7thMassmedia.
Tomi Ahonen
[...] vez se trata del sitio movil de Fanta, que contiene una amplia variedad de contenidos. No queda muy claro de todas formas quién está detrás de la campaña, ya que parece que Ogilvy también está en el [...]
[...] I said we’d start to see this emerge as a serious trend, where the mobile acts as a bridge between the analogue world (aka meat space) and the digital. And I think I was right. We’ve seen lots of first mover activity from 2D barcodes to Nokia’s Point & Find, from Ralph Lauren’s award winning campaign to Fanta’s virtual tennis. [...]
Yes, the Fanta virtual tennis game is pretty cool, if you can get your friend to download the game as well it can be alot of fun.
Nice game idea. Just wanted to download the tennis game to my phone – didn’t work. It’s a pitty, that there are just 8 phones supporting the game. Anyway, I’ll try to get together friends with matching phone types to play it via bluetooth. Seems to be fun. At least the video suggests that