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By Simon Fuller. Soul search. With so many games out there, one could easily believe that branded entertainment’s all about fun. But it can have a dark side too. When British breakbeat DJ Adam Freeland looked to promote his anti-consumerism hit We Want Your Soul a few years back, he teamed up with his friends at digital marketing outfit Kerb, who came up with a spoof website with a simple, if scary, premise – it offered to evaluate your soul.
Professing to be a commercial venture between two companies, the We Want Your Soul destination featured a form in the style of an online personality test, like those frequently spotted on social networking sites.
“Without using the word Zeitgeist, at the time there was a lot of talk on the Net about [things like] the Bush administration,” explains Jim McNiven, Kerb’s managing director, about the idea’s genesis. “Adam’s stuff is mainstream but political. The game then was about consumerism, people being far too busy, maybe getting sucked into TV nonsense – we wanted to do a wake-up call.”
And the subversion proved to be popular. At one point, over 1000 sites on Google were linking directly to the We Want Your Soul destination. So what made it go viral?
“The hook was the evaluation of the soul,” says McNiven. “It had a broad appeal, to both males and females. Casual games are big now, but back then people liked profiling—people loved Myspace, people liked to see what Pop Idol they were, that kind of thing. So [with We Want Your Soul] they could tell people [their quiz results]. The ‘dark’ side appealed to people with darker sensibilities, too.”
We Want Your Soul is proof that branded entertainment can come in unlikely forms. And with those personality tests still commonplace on the likes of Facebook, there might be more that enterprising brands could do with them.