Everything old is new again dep’t: Crowd games in cinema

December 3, 2011 by Dave Haynes

MediaPost has a story up about how National CineMedia and the Audience Entertainment Group have launched an interactive gaming element to the pre-movie entertainment content and Digital OOH advertising package.

Called AudienceGame, MediaPost reports that the  movie audience controls the on-screen action by moving their arms back and forth in unison (or something close to it), giving new meaning to social gaming.

The first big ad client, Disney Cruise Line, launched an AudienceGame campaign in NCM theaters in top markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles and New York. In the Disney AudienceGame, moviegoers are able to guide Donald Duck on a 90-second adventure down an AquaDuck “water coaster” on a Disney cruise ship. The program combines live video and animated overlays.

The Disney Cruise Line AquaDuck AudienceGame is running now through the end of December, part of a new integrated cinema campaign. It includes Disney Cruise Line, Disney Parks & Resorts onscreen spots, Monster Media iPOP interactive display units, and other movie theater marketing elements, such as lobby standees.

Currently, the AudienceGame technology is available in 22 theaters across the country, and NCM hopes to bring the technology to more theaters soon, depending on advertiser interest.

Interesting, but not particularly new.

In May 2007, I reported on a program that MSNBC was doing in cinemas before the trailers and ads really started flying:

It behaves like an arcade game, but instead of there being a game controller, the whole audience is the game controller. The people in the seats before the movie starts lean right and left to control the game.

It was an interesting idea then and is now. It’s actually a little surprising that it took more than three years for someone else to run with this.