ARG's as marketing tools

I've noticed from looking at Portal 2 and during previous essays that Alliterative Reality Games keep coming back as a way of marketing squeals of games. As our focus is on marketing and platform i want to explore how ARGs are used as marketing and why they are so popular.

Halo's ILoveBees created by 42 industries led thousands of people the trailer of halo 2 and got a lot of media coverage and also used the method of transmedia reaching out to many around the world. Portal 2 during my research explored how these games can be used to pull back players back into the world of a game even after a couple of years. Portal's ARG was created by Vavle with no marketing company and there are some companies focusing on Args and advertising.

I have found a websidehttp://www.argology.org/ that has everything to do with ARG's to date. In a new survey 12% ARG's are for marketing alone meaning there is a defiant market for companies to create ARG's to market and there are companies out there using them to market.



A basic definition of a ARG : "Alternate Reality Games are, essentially, a big collaborative story. Pieces of the story can be found online or off. They may be websites or email or video clips (maybe on youtube or television) or audio clips (possibly as podcasts or voicemail messages). You might find them at payphones or libraries or city monuments or, even, cemeteries. The possibilities are endless." -Brooke Thompson

ARG's are always changing and are always different so its hard to place a solid pin to what they are. A couple of different ARG developers have tried to define ARG's in there own way like Adam Martin and Tom Chatfield's. I feel that its best to define something in its simplest way and for me that is "A story told through the use of transmedia and social networking"