The new videogame "Splinter Cell: Double Agent" features a series of in-game product placement by Nivea. The brand aims at reaching the male 18- to 34-year-old market by featuring its product in the main character's hotel bathroom as well as through in-game billboards with slogans like "There are many faces of evil. Don't let yours be one of them" or "The 'Good Guy' almost never has a beard" etc...

An extremely basic mini-site and a series of online sweepstakes are also part of the promotional effort. While the investment in in-game product placement could be considered interesting, the implementation of the campaign on the web looks rather weak. I believe much more could have been done to promote both the videogame and the link with the Nivea brand. Also the prize "meet the game developers" is not really appealing, not even to hard-core gamers which probably aren't even in the Nivea's target audience.

I agree that the presentation is... sparse at best. But the trick is if you click the guy with the X on his face it opens another minisite within it (and explains why this HTML-looking site was made in flash).

I was excited on finding this little nugget until I realized that this contained as little information as the site I had come from, except now it's about Splinter Cell. It does look cooler, however, and I was moved to play for a while inside it before becoming bored. Not to mention, some of the parts of the site I wanted to play with required registration, which stopped me dead in my tracks. I don't even know what I'm going to get yet, and they want my info? I need a little more incentive than none.

Posted by: Chris at October 24, 2006 04:54 PM