Nestea Liquid Awesomeness
Steve is a typical teenager who has been granted (he thinks) several amazing powers due to the natural ingredients of Nestea, that is the main plot of this funny site called “Nestea Liquid Awesomeness” and developed by Venables, Bell and Partners and Odopod.
Told as if streamed live from Steve’s house basement and planned as a series of engaging challenges including things like playing Flute-Hero in order to defeat a cobra, a mechanical bear from where we have to knock him down or throwing a baseball straight to his face with a cannon, every single game has a slow-motion replay to enjoy our little victories, so in the end you can’t avoid laughing at Steve and all the machinery installed at his facility while showing him (in a really fresh and catchy way) that it’s really cool being confident but that he has no ultrapowers.
I also found very interesting that the peeps at Odopod published how they developed part of the site and even the mechanical bear, from sketches to the real one.
Super smart and entertaining
Great website. I wonder if he receives any payment from NESTEA
Super nicely produced technically, but lacks any social dimension at all. Even if it attracted a hundred million users, all of those users are alone. No sharing on FB, no challenge possibility, no rankings, nothing (only facilitating link sharing by email is not my idea of modern social marketing).
Longer post on my blog http://www.samiviitamaki.com
Sami, thanks for your comment, you have a point
but imho i don’t think it’s necessary a platform for social media, social media is done by people and their connections, and the platform’s purpose is to reveal that connections so things can be easily shared and passed
the valuable thing is the site itself, and if it was a crap nobody would share it even if they have Facebook sharing things or making Steve twittering and things like that
for me it’s all about the experience and i found it funny enough as to send it to many friends of mine without sharing buttons or any other mechanism, i think people are smart enough as to be able to share something that they really liked
Daniel, you’re right on the fact that nobody would share crappy content. But I still believe that conversation is king while content is something that facilitates the conversation - brings people together, which is the key point.
The site will undoubtedly gather lots of views and time on site, but this traffic could be manyfold and the experience a lot more engaging if they had tentacled it into different existing social systems and made other people visible on the site and the site visible among people.
And - I still point to the fact that the kids nowadays (an apparent target group) don’t even use email for private communication, so having only a ‘send email’ link here is a design flaw.
I agree with Sami’s point that it is missing the entire social media aspect, but it could be easily incorporated. Although it is entertaining enough that many people who visit the sight would share it with others anyway, adding social media links would only increase the chances.
I thought the website was incredibly amusing and even slightly addicting. The games are actually enough fun, that I had to try them all. At first I was a little bothered that the actual product was not incorporated more, but after spending time on the site, I realized that it just isn’t necessary.
The “awesomeness” factor of the site as a whole really helped the image and the very normal, average kid they used is a great tool to get many people to relate.