Magnum’s Online Pleasure Hunt

There are two occasions when a lady will part with her beloved heels in public. One is at the end of a long night out on the town. The other is in the latest online campaign for Magnum’s new Hazelnut Temptation ice cream created by Lowe Brindfors and developed by B-Reel.

Of course, the latter situation is much more acceptable considering the actress takes on all sorts of physically demanding activities in this innovative advergame, as she whizzes across various websites in the hunt for hazelnut bonbons.

“We’re extremely happy with the casting of our lead star, a French girl with the perfect mix of dancer and acrobatics. Apart from raw talent she’s blessed with tons of patience since lots of wireworks and moves were involved,” says Cecilia Bernard, executive producer at B-Reel.

Controlled by your spacebar and keyboard arrow cursors, she jumps, swings, drives and even partakes in some hang gliding as part of the pleasure hunt for the new Magnum ice cream flavour, which she finally gets acquainted with at the end of the game.

“It was of course also a very technical shoot,” adds Bernard, “there was a lot of keying, rotoscoping, grading and post lighting before we could deliver final assets to our developers who could then add dynamic, interactive life to the girl.”

She makes the point of correcting us that her team don’t do advertising, they create experiences that “happen to be advertising” and says that they need to be entertaining enough for people to voluntarily engage in the marketing.

Whether for advertising purposes or to enhance the experience though, many of the websites that feature in the project were deliberately selected by Lowe Brindfors and Unilever as premium brands that align with the Magnum brand. The heroine runs through a fashion show on YouTube, dances on Spotify and races off in a Saab convertible.

“As we saw it, the version of the internet that the game platform builds upon should be like a treasure box full of pleasures that our heroine could use to her advantage,” explains Lisa Flacké, producer at Lowe Brindfors for Magnum digital.

She goes on to confirm that the classic and probably most famous platform game ever, Super Mario Brothers, entered the team’s thoughts when concocting the idea. But swapping the plumbing pipes and brick walls for the content borders on web pages highlights the innovative thinking behind the campaign.

“As far as we know, no one has ever done a cinematic, fully-controllable game engine with Internet as the playground and with the advertiser’s product as the objective,” she adds.

There is, of course, the time when Lynx partied across the internet, and aspects of the game can be compared to stunts in the more recent Intel spot, The Chase; like when the heroine dives out of a YouTube video, and although the team got quite a scare when that was released, Flacké says the two are far from alike due to Pleasure Hunt’s interactive nature:

“When we saw the Intel film, we all froze for a while before realizing this was just a narrative and not an interactive experience that we were planning. You pray to God every day that no one else will make it happen before you do.”

And B-Reel took the responsibility of developing the project into more than just an internet web film, considering all aspects of the user would connect with what was being presented.

"What we set out to create was a very live and dynamic experience packed into a linear story and we knew that half of the enjoyment would come from the interaction with the character," explains Bernard, "by the time we had the first video assets in place we knew that we were onto something big."

Users can try to get the highest score in the quickest time then challenge their friends on Facebook as part of the campaign.But Bernard continues to say that the time challenge doesn't seem to be at the top of users' agenda:

"Playing the game from start to end takes less than 5 minutes but from what we can see most users stay in the game for almost the double that time. They obviously have a lot of fun on the way."

We know we did, and you can join the hunt here.