February 14, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Web hosting provider Affinity Internet’s Interactive Flash “advergame” ServerMechanic (http://www.ServerMechanic.com) has been a great success and achieved its objectives, the company announced yesterday. The company also announced the winner of its advergame competition.
ServerMechanic was developed to “build brand awareness for Gate.com, a “cutting-edge UNIX and Windows web hosting service”. The game dealt with technical issues faced by IT professionals and how to deal with them. The winners of the game received prizes that included an Xbox 360, the Gears of War game, free domain names, free hosting and a top prize of an LCD flat-screen HD-TV. A total of 216 prizes were given away during the period of the game.
According to the company, “tens of thousands of unique visitors played ServerMechanic and a whopping 63.9 percent of that traffic was obtained virally”. The company also suggested “the majority of the game’s traffic was from word of mouth marketing”.
“We were enthused to see that ServerMechanic, which we had such a good time creating, was also entertaining and rewarding to so many visitors,” explained Affinity Internet’s CEO, Jim Collins. “The game achieved our goal to amuse and reward the IT workers of the world, while also introducing them to our brand. The result was a cost effective, innovative approach to driving market share, customer loyalty and brand recognition in an entertaining and engaging manner. It also provided Affinity with a new mechanism by which we can interact with our customers.”
Mr. Aaron Southern from Calera, Alabama, USA completed the game’s four levels in just 13:07 seconds and was announced the grand prize winner.
