Mini Schin: The Advergame 3 Million Played

In 2007 a brand site for children held a visitor for about thirty seconds. The advergame O Mistério das Cidades Perdidas, The Mystery of the Lost Cities, was played by more than three million people and became a Cannes Lions finalist in 2008.

Mini Schin is a soft drink brand for children. The project is the first storytelling project in Latin America, and it ran when the category had no name in Brazil: corporate storytelling was not a budget line, not a briefing, not a discipline anyone could sell. Storytellers had existed for less than a year. This page is written for the buyer checking whether the practice predates the vocabulary now sold around it.

The Situation: Thirty Seconds of Attention

Brand sites aimed at children in that period followed one shape. Institutional information dressed as entertainment, a few games with no relation to anything, and an average visit of about thirty seconds. The brief was to turn an institutional site into an experience, which raised a harder question: how do you make a child want to stay on the website of a soft drink brand?

The Museum of Mysteries

The player chose a character and was transported into a secret world, with the mission of stopping a villain named Findus Refrigeran. The structure was non-linear, built on the logic of choose your own adventure books, across 42 screens and four minigames, with 84 combinations of story.

The consequence of that architecture is the point of the case. The child decided the direction of the adventure, so each day could produce a different story, which is why the experience stayed online for close to a decade without exhausting itself.

Fernando Palacios has described the underlying mechanism in an interview about the project: basically you are making people pirate an advertisement. She thinks she is there on her own, but in the end it is you who is delivering your message. The player believes the space belongs to them, and the brand message travels inside the choice they made.

The Results

More than 3 million players, across 84 story combinations, and a Cannes Lions finalist in 2008.

The base. The count is of players of the advergame O Mistério das Cidades Perdidas, produced for the Mini Schin brand. The 84 combinations are the distinct story paths the non-linear structure allowed.

The period. The campaign ran in 2007, and the piece was a finalist at the Cannes Lions festival in 2008.

What it means. The method scales, and the validation came from a third party. A Cannes jury looked at a piece of Brazilian brand narrative and put it in the final round, which turns the founding thesis of the practice into a fact verifiable outside the house. When a single case has to prove pioneering work with external audit, this is the one.

What This Case Proves

Interaction outperforms exposure. When a person chooses the path, that person becomes a coauthor of the story, and coauthors stay. Thirty seconds of tolerance became a return visit, because the visit belonged to the visitor.

The case also settles a question about timing. The techniques now sold as content marketing, gamification and branded entertainment were already operating together in a Brazilian project in 2007, before the vocabulary arrived.

The Method Behind It

The instruments are the 8 Steps and Strategic Entertainment, described in the method. This case is the origin record of the practice, and the reader it serves is the buyer checking the dates. The applied forms for teams sit in the for teams index, and the commissioned form in the services.

Yamaha and IT Mídia sit alongside this one in the case index.