Comcastic Advergame Review

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  Gaming, Branding, Advergame reviews

Fresh on the heels of a retro TV commercial, spoofing the $10,000 Pyramid is the Comcastic
website and embedded advergames.

With a 70’s look and feel the broadband site is promoting Comcast’s cable services through activities and games.

What I liked: The games on this site are well done, and match the overall promotion. Each game is very simple to play, requiring just the mouse, they have simple, but not cheap graphics, and the gameplay is straight forward. User’s don’t have to read through lots of instructions to understand what to do.

They have also thought through the activities and made games that mesh well with the overall goal. I see very little overt branding yet the entire experience “feels” Comcastic. Each game relates to some aspect of technology and broadband, without beating the user over the head that it is a Comcast ad.

I also really like the choice they made with regards to user registration. Everyone is free to play the games as much as they want, but you must register in order to make the high score boards, or to use the tell a friend feature. This should provide a good nudge to very active users without chasing off a more casual audience.

What I didn’t like: There’s really only 2 things that I dislike about this site. First is that it takes over my entire screen. Fortunately this is in a popup window so it isn’t as annoying as other sites but it is still unacceptable. There’s no reason for the games to be full screen. (You’ll notice the link goes straight to the game page, and not the launcher page )

Second, the games are very bandwidth intensive. This is a bit of a quibble given the ever-increasing broadband penetration but on a site trying to sell high-speed service it would be nice to allow narrow-band users the ability to play.

Overall: This is one of the best advergame/advertainment sites I’ve seen in a while. They have nailed the execution, successfully reinforced the message without ramming it down the user’s throat, and overall made a solid promotional site.