Mobile advertising and mobile gaming combine for BMW Z4

Artificial Life launched it’s new mobile game for iPhone today. The BMW Z4 Experience gaming application is an advergame -  a mobile game specifically created to advertise a brand or product. In this case, it’s a collection of four mini-games dedicated to the new BMW Z4 Roadster.

Four different games let you experience something of the new car: Free Driving, Art Experience, Driving Experience, and Navigation Experience. The first two are combination driving/painting games. The third is an actual driving game, and the final is a “tavelling salesman” puzzle game.

Most important to those who this app is being targetted at will be the carefully created digital models of the BMW Z4 Roadster.

You can check the game out at the Apple App Store: http://itunes.com/app/bmwz4experience

From the release:

“After the very successful launch of the free application ‘BMW Z4 - An Expression of Joy. - Lite’, Artificial Life has extended the title with a new interface, additional mini-games and the integration of Facebook Connect. I’d like to thank Artificial Life for the outstanding work and we look forward to collaborating with Artificial Life on further projects. The ‘BMW Z4 Experience’ is again an excellent opportunity to experience BMW in a joyful way!” said Andreas Schwarzmeier, Licensing Manager at BMW Sport Marketing & Cooperation.

“We are very pleased to offer fans a creative experience with their virtual Z4 Roadster with this collection of new games. I would like to thank BMW once again for the opportunity to work together on the Z4 project and for their generous support. We have received tremendous positive feedback and very high download numbers for the lite version and we hope all BMW fans will enjoy this new and expanded experience even more!” said Eberhard Schoneburg, CEO of Artificial Life, Inc.

What we think?

BMW has a history of using mobile advertising extremely well. It created a dotMobi site for the 1 Series last year that we quite liked, and its now legendary snow tires campaign achieved a staggering click-through-rate. I’m not usually a fan of advergaming - they usually end up being a bad game combined with a bad ad, but this offering actually seems like it has good content for BMW fans. It’s well targetted, for one thing. People likely to want to download this app are probably pretty well-off - so Artificial Life will probably get away with the 1 dollar charge on the app. Not only that, they’ve made sure that the 3D model for the machine adheres to the actual BMW model. Which, lets face it, is what people will be downloading this app for anyyway.