A creative agency called ATTIK has rather proudly announced a new launch today with the iPad edition of The Onion satirical newspaper. It has created a game called Scion College Rebate Rally, which is built entirely with HTML5 compliant technology, and is playable as an interstitial advertisement on the app.
What’s the story?
ATTIK is a “creative” agency – it doesn’t “do” any particular type of advertising, but focuses on integrating all of the different marketing disciplines depending on what’s best for the current campaign. In this case, it decided that a good way to advertise the new Scion from Toyota (which is being specifically marketed to a younger audience) was put a game on a popular iPad application. The game will be appearing as an interstitial advertisement on The Onion iPad edition for June, and users can choose to either skip it or play it when it pops up. But when it DOES appear, it is a fully playable mobile game. You don’t need to link out to another site, or open an app. It plays right there on your screen.
Michael Greer, CTO at The Onion said “this is a fun, new technology for us and it is always great to collaborate with brands who share an interest in pushing the limits to produce something innovative and exciting.”
Simon Needham, ATTIK’s co-founder and executive creative director said “we wanted to find a fun, engaging, interactive way to inform Scion’s target audience about its new rebate program. Although I understand that the iPad’s javascript engine is typically a challenge for animation, by using a physics engine and CSS3, our [team has] produced amazing visuals and interaction for this iPad game. Even though it’s built in HTML5, we feel it compares very well to full apps… and technology aside, we are very proud of the creative ideas, approach and strategy on this latest client-driven initiative.”
What we think?
HTML is the basic language of the Internet, and HTML5 is the latest version of it. One of the more exciting things about HTML5 is that it is being expanded hugely to include coding for mobile devices. By combining HTML5 with Javascript and CSS3, it should be possible to create a “web app” that runs as well as any native application on any smartphone. I say “should” because HTML5 isn’t actually ready yet, and there are a lot of its features that aren’t supported by most of the smartphones on the market. But in theory HTML5 is really great. The creative team from ATTIK had a lot of challenges getting this to work properly on the iPad, but they’ve proven that it can be done – and completely in-house as well.
