IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Left 4 Dead 2 Marketing Part Two: Kongregate's Lee Uniacke

Posted November 25, 2009 by David Radd

Any modern gaming ad campaign has numerous “touch points” with consumers, meaning that it reaches them in magazines, on billboards and online. Left 4 Dead 2 is as high profile a release as you’ll see this holiday, and naturally it too tries to reach users in ways both conventional and viral, including the “Infected Fury Month” on the site Kongregate. Continuing from yesterday's marketing feature, we caught up with Kongregate’s Chief Revenue Officer Lee Uniacke, who was kind enough to take time out of the beginning of his Thanksgiving break in Delaware to talk to us about this recent promotional campaign.

IndustryGamers: How did Valve approach you for this Left 4 Dead 2 promotion?

Lee Uniacke: We helped launch Left For Dead 1 with integration last Fall. We got 60,000 people to try out this zombie Flash game and get a badge for their profile pages. We did an editorial on integration, and they liked that. They were looking for something bigger that would be both social and viral this time, so we talked with their ad agency to try and figure out what we can do as a site that would be cool for users and give them a big branding opportunity.

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IG: How did you come up with the "Infected Fury Month" idea?

LU: One of the big goals was introducing users into the Left 4 Dead 2 fiction. Everyone seems to like zombies, so turning users into zombies was a natural move. The set up was that you, your family and friends were turned into zombies and they’d all be zombies by the time the game launched, a prelude of the game itself.

We had two levels of survivors and zombies, one where you’d be your regular avatar, a blue border if you were normal and blood splatter if you’re a zombie. In the second level, you could turn into a special infected, you could infect more people on the site, or if you turn into a special survivor, you could find more survivors. I thought it would do well and 93 percent of the avatars were participating as you scrolled through any page. What’s interesting is the people who switched out their avatars for one of the special avatars, somewhere around 30 to 40 percent choose to get the increased powers.

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.