“A fun, social spin on musical chairs.” —Troy Lachance

“Great example of physical-meets-interactive advertising that integrates the product in a super creative way. Kudos to the team behind this for balancing interactive design with gaming and product promotion.” —Dustin Callif

Overview: Furniture maker Blu Dot wanted to increase its social media presence and promote its latest creation, the Hot Mesh Chair, to an audience of design-minded furniture lovers. From the very start, Blu Dot, mono, Honest and Doppio developed this interactive, online version of Musical Chairs with a focus on maintaining the spirit of the childhood game. Music videos for six different songs were broken randomly into five segments. At each break, one of 50 unique phrases appeared. Players, signed in via Twitter, entered the phrase as fast as they could. If they typed the phrase correctly—and quickly enough—their Twitter avatar appeared next to a chair, and they moved on to the next round. When a game wasn’t in session, looped videos showed the musicians killing time by doing yoga, playing miniature golf, reading a newspaper, doing push-ups or pecking at a typewriter.

• The game was built in about three months.
• Custom music videos were created for six songs, with one or two versions of each song.
• The campaign had 1,488,960 estimated impressions within Blu Dot’s Twitter network, and a total of 3,281,493 social impressions.

Comments by mono:
What was the thinking behind the navigation structure? “It was designed to leverage the online functionality already familiar to our audience, and to be as simple as possible. The entry field functions as Twitter’s does. The only other content on the page is the band and the chairs, making the gameplay very clear.”

What software, back-end technology and programming languages were used? “The site was all HTML5 with a Flash fallback for the video content. We also used a lot of Node.js modules, but the critical ones were Express and Socket.IO. Additional technologies used were Redis, MongoDB and Nginx. Because the technology we were using was being applied in a novel way, it was difficult to account for all potential bugs until after the first few live games. As a result, we had to be quick on our feet and troubleshoot issues in real time.”

What was the response? “The event lasted for ten days. During that time, we had 10,697 page visits, 59 percent of which were unique visitors. The average visit lasted 4:32, a duration approximately equal to a full Blu Dot Musical Chairs game.”