• by April 3, 2007

MSNBC.com's first brand campaign angles to get newshounds to interact with its vast content hub by means of an interactive game and screensaver, along with an unusual in-cinema effort that deploys a new technology.

The MSNBC.com campaign dubbed "A Fuller Spectrum of News" aims to position the No. 2 online news provider as a brand that takes readers on a multimedia safari that guarantees a diverse and enticing array of news, entertainment, and other information.

SS+K, a New York-based agency, developed the integrated campaign that includes TV, print, and online media, as well as the games to encourage true interaction with the site's news content.

The "Newsbreaker" interactive game, which launches April 13, essentially invites readers to engage directly with news stories on MSNBC.com. The game, facilitated via a RSS reader, features the campaign's colorful grid motif. A jet flies across the grid, swerving into the colored bricks. Readers hear snippets of stories and see an array of visuals; the colored bricks represent stories on MSNBC.com.

"We want people to engage with the brand and the idea," said Marty Cooke, chief creative officer, SS+K. "The game is fun because it's a mash-up of Brick Breaker and the site." Players use a paddle which deflects a ball to destroys colored bricks, some of which will send down an RSS headline, which extends the game; the headlines are then collected in a queue to be read later.When readers click on a brick, they are connected to a real-time headline and news story on MSNBC.com.

"The idea of linking the banner ads to the real time news is really cool; you see the stories manifest out of the bricks," Cooke said. The agency enlisted Fuel to develop the online RSS game, while the in-cinema game was created by Brand Experience Lab. Boston-based Beam crafted the screensaver and online ads.

The in-cinema game will debut in May in three theaters in L.A., Philadelphia, and White Plains, N.Y., and uses a never-before-used technology called Magic Mirror developed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

The audience looks at the screen and tries to catch the bricks. In order to catch the bricks it must lean to the left or the right to move the game paddle. The paddle responds in real-time to the collective motion of the audience. The camera sees the audience and controls the motion of the paddle.

The interactive MSNBC.com newsstream screensaver allows readers to click on any brick on the undulating color grid to connect with a real-time headline and story. The screensaver is powered by a RSS feed.

"We were trying to differentiate MSNBC.com from the other online news sources CNN and Yahoo," Cooke added. The use of a multicolored visual grid as the campaign's linchpin "is a metaphor for the breadth of news on MSNBC.com ... everything from the sacred to the profane, the serious and the silly," he said.

According to comScore Media Metrix, MSNBC.com--with 25.8 million unique visitors in February--ranked second to Yahoo News with 36.2 million. Despite an overall growth rate of 12% in the general news category compared to February 2006, MSNBC recorded a 3% decline, comScore also reports. MSNBC.com disputes those measurements, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The new campaign features one 30-second TV ad and two :10s (running on cable nets like ESPN, Discovery, NBC Universal properties, and The Food Network, along with a flight on United Airlines in-flight entertainment). More than 30 print ads are running in such mags as Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and The New Yorker, as well as banner ads running all over the Web. The estimated $4 million media plan was executed by The Media Kitchen.