interactive marketing | SunMatrix Ramble

Build with Chrome: LEGO Chrome Experiment

Google earlier this week released their latest Chrome Experiment in partnership with LEGO called “Build with Chrome”.

Now anybody who visits www.buildwithchrome.com via their Chrome browser can use their mouse or touchscreen to build something out of the virtual LEGO bricks and share them directly on Google+.

Why this is a smart Chrome Experiment

This is a simple product demonstration disguised as play. It shows off what the browser can do by putting it in service of something people already understand. Building with LEGO.

Low learning curve. If you can drag and drop, you can participate.
Touch-ready by design. Mouse and touchscreen both make sense for “building”.
Social distribution baked in. Sharing is part of the experience, not an afterthought.

What to take from this if you are building interactive brand work

Make the capability tangible. Don’t explain performance. Let people feel it.
Choose a familiar metaphor. Familiar mechanics reduce friction and increase time spent.
Design sharing as a natural next step. If the output is personal, people want to show it.
Keep the experience single-purpose. One clear activity beats a feature kitchen sink.

A few fast answers before you act

What is “Build with Chrome”?

It is a Google Chrome Experiment built with LEGO that lets people create virtual LEGO models in the browser using a mouse or touchscreen, then share them online.

Why partner with LEGO?

Because LEGO is an instantly understood building system. It makes the digital interaction feel intuitive, playful, and worth sharing.

What is the core marketing mechanic here?

Hands-on participation. The experience turns a browser capability into a personal creation that people can publish socially.

What makes a Chrome Experiment effective?

It demonstrates a technology through an interaction people enjoy, without requiring explanation, and it encourages sharing through an output people feel ownership of.

What is the transferable lesson for digital teams?

If you want people to remember a platform capability, wrap it in a simple activity that creates something personal and shareable.

Budweiser: Poolball, football on a pool table

Coming to a Buenos Aires pub near you is the newly minted sport of Poolball, created by Ogilvy Argentina for Budweiser.

Two teams meet on a giant 7×3 meter pool table. Fifteen soccer balls are reskinned to look like pool balls. The competitors use their feet instead of cues to score.

A new bar sport with a brand stitched into it

Poolball takes two things that already belong in the same evening. Football and beer. Then it adds a third. The “I could play that” simplicity of pool. The result feels less like a stunt and more like a playable product.

Standalone takeaway: Poolball is a brand activation that fuses two familiar games into one instantly understandable format, so people stop watching and start participating without needing instructions.

The mechanic: one rulebook, two rituals

The mechanic is the entire idea. A pool table scaled up to human size. Pool-ball visuals on footballs. Pool rules translated into foot play. When the mechanic is this legible, the content is self-explaining and the crowd becomes the amplification layer.

BTL is often used as shorthand for below-the-line activity. In practice, it means a brand experience designed to be felt in the real world, then shared because it is worth retelling.

Why it works in a pub

Bar-friendly activations win when they create quick status moments. You either played it, you watched someone nail a shot, or you filmed the chaos. Poolball naturally creates all three, because every “pocket” attempt is a mini highlight.

It also lowers the risk of participation. You are not learning a new sport. You are remixing two you already know, with rules you can copy by watching one play.

The intent behind the fun

Budweiser is not selling a feature here. It is selling association. Big-game energy. Competitive banter. Social proof that the brand belongs in the centre of group nights out.

When the game is branded but not fragile, the brand becomes the host of the experience rather than the interruption inside it.

What to steal from Poolball

Fuse, don’t invent. Combine two known behaviours so the audience understands the format instantly.
Make the object the media. A giant playable artefact beats a screen when your goal is participation.
Design for highlights. Build in repeatable “shot” moments people want to film and replay.
Keep rules visible. If someone can learn it by watching one round, you have the right complexity level.
Let branding be structural. Brand the experience itself, not every surface area with logos.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Poolball?

Poolball is a branded game format that combines football and pool. Players kick footballs designed like pool balls on a giant pool table and score using pool-style goals.

Why does this kind of activation travel well across venues?

Because it is easy to understand, easy to spectate, and it produces repeatable highlight moments. Venues like it because it creates crowd energy. Brands like it because the crowd documents it.

What makes the mechanic “shareable” without forcing sharing?

The visual contrast does the work. A human-scale pool table and “pool ball” footballs create an immediate “what is that” reaction, so filming feels natural rather than incentivised.

How do you keep a branded game from feeling like a gimmick?

Make it genuinely playable. Simple rules. Clear scoring. Quick rounds. If the experience is fun without the brand name, the brand credit comes for free.

What’s the minimum viable version of this idea?

A single hybrid rule, one striking physical cue, and one repeatable scoring moment. If people can explain it in one sentence, you have the right foundation.

Burgeranch: Combina, hack the quiz

Burgeranch is an Israeli fast food chain that launched a new burger deal called “combina,” which basically means outsmarting the system with the deal and getting a whole lot more food for less money.

McCann Erickson Israel then built an unusual engagement campaign that followed the same combina logic. The official campaign drove users to an online quiz that was impossible to answer correctly. Meanwhile, clues were seeded on how to “hack” the quiz by changing certain details in the URL. Once word spread, the campaign took off, and what looked like a risky strategy became a success story.

A prank with a purpose

The smart part is that the campaign does not just talk about combina. It makes you do it. The brand promise is “more for less if you are clever.” The campaign mechanic is “win by being clever.”

The mechanism: impossible quiz, then a discoverable loophole

The experience starts with frustration. You cannot win honestly. Then it shifts into discovery. If you notice the URL, and you experiment, and you share what you found, you can beat the system. That arc turns a standard promotional quiz into a social object people want to trade tips about.

In consumer internet cultures where people love to “beat the system,” campaigns can scale faster through shared discovery than through paid media alone.

Why it lands: you are not just a participant, you are “in on it”

Most promotions put the brand above the user. This one flatters the user. It frames the audience as clever enough to spot the workaround, and that changes the emotional tone from “contest” to “inside joke.”

Standalone takeaway: If your proposition is about smart value, you can make the audience feel smart by designing a loophole that is easy to learn, satisfying to exploit, and irresistible to share.

The business intent behind the “hack”

The intent is to create talkability that matches the product story. A deal that feels like outsmarting the system needs a launch that feels like outsmarting the system. Done well, the tactic does two jobs at once. It drives attention and it pre-frames the offer as a savvy choice rather than a cheap one.

What to steal from Combina

Align mechanic to meaning. The interaction should embody the product promise, not sit beside it.
Engineer a shareable discovery. People share tips, not slogans.
Keep the “hack” simple. One obvious tweak beats a complex exploit. The point is participation, not technical skill.
Control the risk envelope. Make sure the loophole cannot spill into real security issues or uncontrolled costs.
Reward the behaviour you want. The payoff should reinforce “smart value,” not just random freebies.

A few fast answers before you act

What is the Burgeranch “Combina” hack campaign?

It is a launch campaign built around an impossible online quiz, where users are nudged to discover that they can “win” by changing parts of the URL. The discovery spreads by word of mouth and mirrors the idea of outsmarting the system.

Why make the quiz impossible in the first place?

Because frustration creates a reason to look for a workaround. The moment a user suspects there is a trick, the campaign shifts from answering questions to solving a puzzle, which is more social and more shareable.

What makes this different from typical gamified promotions?

The game is not the questions. The game is the loophole. That design turns the audience into collaborators who trade knowledge, rather than isolated contestants.

What are the main risks of “hack-themed” marketing?

Confusion, trust issues, and accidental security optics. If people think you are encouraging real hacking, or if the mechanic resembles a vulnerability, the campaign can backfire quickly.

How do you adapt this pattern safely today?

Design an intentional, harmless “cheat code” that is clearly part of the experience, set strict limits on rewards, and make the discovery feel playful rather than illicit.