Comcast Town
So, the commercials definitely caught my eye; vibrant colors, isometric artwork done in pencil lines but apparently inspired by those awesome eBoy posters,that chirpy soundtrack. It was clearly a videogame aesthetic. But they were also terrible at marketing what they were actually marketing… half the time I couldn’t remember what company they were for.
Much less did I even notice that what the actual product Comcast was attempting to market was a virtual apartment builder and virtual interface to their services!
That isn’t the only time that Comcast Town suffers from an excess of art and lack of functionality, either. The aesthetic carries through all the way — super awesome visuals, with slooow popup boxes. Watch video on the menu — but it opens the tab of another site altogether. Cute apartment building, with some nice usability — and no actual town, or even directory of places to go see. Facebook integration — that tries to post a story every time I buy an item.
Basically, this is a version of MyMiniLife that is heavily branded for Comcast. There isn’t any multiplayer to it, and there don’t appear to be avatars.
Purchasing the first TV, phone, and computer serves as a way to give you ads about Comcast’s services for each, while also adding a tab with some additional functionality to your interface. The TV opens a partner for video streaming, the phone lets you invite friends and message them, and the computer… I don’t remember what it does. 🙂
There’s a virtual currency, furniture to buy, the promise of limited edition digital objects, and even a community spotlight for a cool room. User-generated content is limited to being able to attach annotations to the objects you place — sort of as a “user profile” of sorts. Essentially, it’s simple SNS as virtual apartment building — which took CyWorld pretty far in South Korea.
It’s worth checking out if only to get a glimpse of one way to “virtualize” a company’s website.
6 Responses to “Comcast Town”
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Those commercials are so incredibly awful, that if I had an alternative available in my area, I would leave Comcast just for airing them.
More appropriately, a way to virtualize a brand but completely neglect the functionality of the companys existing a web site.
I did see one of those just the other day, and was very surprised to see it was Comcast. I thought it was a PBS children’s show at first. And at the end I still did not know that it was for something specific. I assumed it was just a new (granted, badly executed) branding direction for them.
These sort of hyper-branded campaigns always seem so darn narcissistic to me. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of marketers, not all products can be branded as a lifestyle.
That said, great visuals and excellent flash work by whomever produced this site.
Wait, really? I’ve seen those commercials dozens of times and never realized they were for something other than cable service.
Now that I know what it is, though, I’m not quite sure why anyone would want it.
My wife and I were sucked in a few times by the cute animals they have at the beginning of the commercials. That made us back up the TiVO.
But the content of the commercials themselves made no sense. I still don’t know what they were for, and I was annoyed by how obtuse they were being.
-Michael
Muckbeast – Game Design and Online Worlds
http://www.muckbeast.com