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March, 2007

Mar 28.07

Developer debuts games made by Greenwich firm

from Stamford Advocate | Mar. 28, 2007

By Harold Davis

Greenwich-based Antares Investment Partners is known its impressive portfolio of real estate in the area, but the company is looking to add more marketing zing with three online games created with Shift Control Media, also of Greenwich.

The games were created to promote Antares’ controversial Greenwich Place and Greenwich Oaks properties, which include about 400 residential condominiums recently converted from apartments.

Residents of the properties, formerly named Putnam Green and Weaver’s Hill, are suing Antares, alleging that the developer failed to follow state statutes governing condominium conversions, unfairly raised the rents of senior citizens and improperly tried to evict tenants by putting their health and safety at risk.

Antares has disputed the claims.

“We’re looking to generate interest and target people interested in Greenwich. We hope to turn suspects into prospects and prospects into sales,” said Antares managing partner James Cabrera.

“The original idea was to raise awareness using a new medium, which are games,” Cabrera said. The games have a good tone and are not overly solicitous, said Tim Zuckert, president and chief executive officer of Shift Control.

“When people smell the marketing, they go away,” Zuckert said.

The games took about eight to 10 weeks to develop and were designed to be Greenwich-centric. The first online game, “Avenue Rally,” involves driving in the area of Greenwich Avenue to complete various tasks, such as returning a book to Greenwich Library.

“You have to avoid getting too many traffic violations. The more violations you get, the more aggressive the police get,” said Zuckert, whose company opened in July and has games for PepsiCo, Napster and FedEx.

“Hedger” will require getting a hedge fund manager safely from work to his boat, and “Trade Up” involves buying and selling real estate in order to get a mansion.

Since launching the game site, www.greenwichctgames.com , three weeks ago, Antares has received more than 15,000 hits, Zuckert said.

Players are eligible to win prizes from 150 Greenwich retailers participating in the games’ “Best of Greenwich Sweepstakes,” said Andrea Pirrotti, head of marketing at Antares.

Prizes range include $50 gift shopping certificates, dinner for two at restaurants such as Polpo and a stay at the Delmar Greenwich Harbor Hotel, one of Antares’ properties. The grand prize is $5,000 worth of shopping at Richards, which is also featured in the game.

Kevin McEvoy, professor of marketing at the University of Connecticut in Stamford, said that online marketing campaigns such as Antares’ have become more mainstream.

“Games for promotion and marketing are nothing new,” McEvoy said. “What’s new is what the Internet does for it. Its brings sound, noise and action, and you don’t need a game piece to play. The key is the interaction of games, which makes them so exciting.”

Companies that want to be “cutting edge, progressive and savvy” are using this approach, he said. Pirrotti said real estate development and private equity firm may consider more games in its future marketing campaigns.

“We’re assessing the results and optimizing this to the Nth degree to see if it’s a appropriate to do them for other properties,” Pirrotti said. “We’re very ROI (return on investment) driven, but the numbers are on the right trajectory.”

Mar 19.07

Antares finds creative way to lure buyers into Greenwich homes

From Fairfield County Business Journal

By Alexander Soule

You are a Greenwich hedge fund manager who bet correctly on the recent stock market correction. Stepping out into the sunshine on a sunny spring day, you decide to take a short walk to bask in the rays at Steamboat Landing, where your 65-foot yacht Louis XVI is docked across from the Delamar Hotel.

Whistling a Broadway show tune, you step out onto Greenwich Avenue, and splat you are road kill.

Hedger is one of three “advergames” cooked up by the staff of Shift Control Media Inc., a company formed last July that has designed a game to showcase its home base of Greenwich for client Antares Investment Partners.

The Web site, GreenwichCTGames.com, also includes “Avenue Rally,” in which players drive through Greenwich running errands. Coming soon is “Trade Up,” where one takes the persona of a Greenwich real estate mogul and attempts to improve a property portfolio.

The real estate firm hopes the games will spur people who might not ordinarily consider living in Greenwich to take another look. As an additional lure, Antares is running a minisweepstakes for people who frequent the site, with restaurant, hotel and shopping giveaways.

“The real estate business in general is not on the cutting edge of advertising and marketing,” said Jim Cabrera, co-founder of Antares. “From our standpoint, we have a tremendous database of potential buyers that we are collecting as a result of this.”

Advergames trace their history to the era of floppy discs, when American Home Foods issued disc-based games to market its Chef Boyardee canned pasta. Perhaps the most successful site today is William Wrigley Jr. Co.’s Candystand.com site, which features games supporting its gum and LifeSavers candy brands. The Web site is one of the 2,000 most trafficked sites in the United States, according to the Alexa Internet subsidiary of Amazon.com.

Kim Gregson, an Ithaca College professor who researches gaming, examined the use of advergames to promote snack-food products and alcoholic beverages.

“We found that people looked at them as games not as advertisements,” Gregson said. “So if the advergame didn’t have the bells and whistles, good graphics, fun game play people didn’t like them and it reflected badly on the product.”

A backlash against the genre has also cropped up, termed anti-advergaming. Persuasion Games created “Disaffected” in which players take the role of fictional FedEx Kinko’s employees who are task-challenged.

GreenwichCTGames.com has yet to crack the top million, but in the early going it is generating 4.8 page views per user, a better rate than Candystand.com.

Advergames generated $84 million in revenue in 2004, according to Boston market-research firm Yankee Group, which estimated the sector would quadruple in size by 2012.

Shift Control Media competitors include Skyworks Technologies Inc. of Hackensack, N.J., and New York City’s Arkadium Inc., whose clients have included Fairfield-based General Electric Co. and GE subsidiary NBC.

“If you think about the way all of us … are consuming media, there is a big shift away from TV,” said Tim Zuckert, president and chief executive of Shift Control Media. “We all have more ways of avoiding advertising … The minute you start to make (advergaming) feel like a front for marketing, it’s game over.”

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