ABOUT

As part of their ongoing mission to promote the UK as a popular tourist destination, VisitBritain asked Brand42 to capitalise on the eternal buzz of 007 by developing a thrilling interactive spy competition based loosely around the Bond movie Skyfall.

Brand42’s work was designed to increase Facebook likes, Twitter followers and email sign-ups on the VisitBritain website. We also aimed to increase the movement of players across platforms in order to increase traffic on other VisitBritain channels and to promote their full range of content types. Lastly, we were instructed to burn the brief immediately after we’d read it.

The world is mad about Bond so we knew we had a reputation to uphold; the pressure was on. We wanted to make sure that the dynamic game play; visual design and structural narrative did our glorious nation- and Mr Bond- justice. So we decided to show off GB and our infamous 007 through a series of dangerously engrossing missions set in some of the most unique and bond-esque locations throughout the country.

We also wanted to make sure that our strategy was accessible to non-native English speakers. We created an innate Bond-ness in our design, the kind that instantly transcends language barriers, continents and cultures. Everything in the game play, narration and the visual identity was geared towards delivering the British sophistication embodied by the nation’s greatest spy.

Due to the requirement of creating versions that worked seamlessly across the different screen resolutions across platforms, including Facebook, Yahoo and VisitBritain, we decided to use HTML5 with a CSS3 responsive design so that the game would dynamically fit into the width, this also optimised the mobile experience of the App.

We anticipated (and received) substantial user flows and high traffic so Amazon Web Services helped us to manage the spread of traffic. CloudFront was used as a Content Delivery Network to duplicate media in different regions so reaching the end user faster. As language choice we used PHP to handle all server side scripts and MySQL as database storage. On front-end we used HTML with CSS3 and java-script with jQuery. Mission accomplished.

The game proved to be a highly successful marketing platform for VisitBritain with 800,000+ video views and players from 188 countries generating an estimated potential contribution of £12million in additional visitor expenditure, a return of 184:1 based on agency costs.