• by Shankar Gupta , February 3, 2005

In an effort to reach the coveted 18-34 market, the Campbell Soup Company recently partnered with VirTu Mobile, a mobile media company, to produce a 3D snowboarding game to promote Campbell's "Soup at Hand" brand, VirTu announced Wednesday.

The game, "Soup at Hand Snowboarding," has players snowboard down the slopes, accruing points by doing tricks and collecting Soup at Hand containers, which also extend the length of the game. The game is hosted on Soup at Hand's Web site, and promoted by banner ads on that site and on www.bonus.com, a mobile game developer who produced the game for VirTu and Campbell's. It is not hosted on Campbell's main page, and the Soup at Hand site is not linked from the main Campbell's page.

VirTu President Joe Barone said the initiative was designed to capture young adults. "If you look at the target audience of 18- to-34-year-olds, traditional media doesn't work as well," said Barone. "They're viewing less TV because they're playing more video games; they don't listen to radios because they have iPods; and they don't read newspapers," he said. Cell phones are a good alternative to TV, said Barone, because people play games for a lot longer than the 30 seconds it takes to watch a TV ad, giving the company additional branding time.

"Cell phones are a medium they use every day. Mobile gaming is something that this target audience tends to play," Barone said. "Over the course of a month or two, a person could play a game over an hour. Whenever they have downtime--they're waiting for something--they play a game on their mobile phone."

Campbell's Soup at Hand Web page features an Extreme sports theme, and the brand sponsors two snowboarders and a skateboarder. The site also features a design-your-own snowboard, skateboard, and surfboard function. The game has been available since the end of November, Barone said, and is still in an "early phase of the test." Barone declined to state the number of times the game had been downloaded.