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| Million happy
hits By Barry Rollings Volume 50, No. 1, February 8, 2007 |
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The numbers who have visited the Navy Lifestyle website since its launch on October 23 and those who have played the Extreme Battleships game since Navy launched it on September 21 are “pretty amazing”, says the marketing officer Navy HQ Defence recruiting LCDR Ian Lumsden. “Of the two websites we have developed, the two-player Extreme Battleships game can be accessed only through MSN Messenger,” he said. “It is the first time anyone in the world has built a two-player game for MSN Messenger. At its launch, it immediately became their most popular game and has remained there since. Microsoft (MSN) is doing an international case study on it because this is the first time someone has built a game and brought it to them as a marketing tool.” Players can position virtual RAN ships, other platforms and their weapons on a map and play Extreme Battleships with them. MSN demographics research suggests that users range from 13 years to 50 with most being under 35. Extreme Battleships has been played for the equivalent of one human lifetime since September 21, 2006. The game has been played more than 1.62 million times by 385,000 absolute unique browsers and 61,387 of these have clicked through to defencejobs.gov.au and 104,725 have clicked through to the Intel brief feature of the game where they can find out more about the Navy. Nearly 900 people have started their online application as a direct result of the game. “The game provides the ability for players to click back through the game to the Defence website,” LCDR Lumsden said. “There had been no information until now to show that a game could be positively linked to a job site until Extreme Battleships. “Because of the relationship we have built with MSN on this, the cost per acquisition (application) is lower than anything else that we do in marketing. “We also have built a complete website, the Navy Lifestyle website, which uses the latest three-dimensional computer animation, so you can explore what life is like on a frigate during the course of a day.” Interested website visitors could click on the ship’s cook, for example, and follow him or her on a day in their life. By accessing defencejobs.gov.au/navy, viewers can click on a world map and follow a ship through the course of its annual deployment. “The big thing we have been trying to do is demystify for many what it really is like being in the Navy,” LCDR Lumsden said. “Most of the public only see tearful goodbyes as ships sail out through the heads and the public gets to know nothing of what Navy does at sea.” |
