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Newsbytes News Network - August 4, 2000
(c) Copyright 2000 Post-Newsweek Business Information, Inc. All rights reserved.

WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 2000 AUG 04 (NB). Writers and editors beware: There is an insidious little game out there on the Web that can make you an unwitting participant in a public relations campaign that actually seeks to play against your instinctive loathing for annoying PR ploys.

Most media professionals are familiar with the pushy PR flack who bombards them with e-mails and media kits about bs2bs.com, or whatever the e-commerce flavor de jour happens to be. Now an enterprising PR firm is betting irritated writers and editors will soon compete for high scores in their new online game "Whack-a-Flack."

In a decidedly Dilbert-esque twist on the old theme-park game, http://www.whackaflack.com lets players give their least favorite PR flacks a taste of their own medicine.

"Hunkered down behind the safety of a cubicle wall, you are equipped with an arsenal of badly written and boring press releases which have been folded into paper airplanes," the site instructs you before playing. "Your job is to send them back to their makers! (The press releases, not the P.R. people.)"

The game allows players to select a particularly annoying PR firm from an impressive list of about 20 PR companies. Once players have selected their target, they get to choose a reason for "whacking" the firm that gets under their skin (for example, they could be "pushy", "clueless", "rude", "annoying", "paranoid," or "butt-kissers," to name just a few).

The game is fairly entertaining, and even somewhat gratifying: PR flacks pop up from behind cubicles, and you try to nail 'em with their own press releases. Borrowing a page from popular arcade shoot-em-up games, "whack-a-flack" players reload by hitting a stack of press releases; shoot a coffee cup, and you've got rapid-fire power.

Whack-a-Flack creator e-tractions.com plans to release the names of the PR firms that got whacked the most, who did the whacking, and why.

There's just one catch: players are required to enter their occupation, gender, and e-mail address (or at least a valid one) before being allowed to play.

But e-tractions CEO Michael Gauthier said the company has no plans to distribute any personal information gleaned from the game, and that information about the "whackers" would be released on Aug. 28 only in the aggregate.

Gauthier said the number of players have nearly doubled each day since the game's release on Monday, and that the site would soon support a function that allows registered players to e-mail the link to their friends and colleagues.

"Historically, there has been a big difference between promotion and direct marketing," Gauthier said. "What we do is combine the two into entertainment marketing that gives our clients a better understanding of what the community feels about them as an industry and as a company."

While Gauthier admits the game is somewhat simplistic and not very scientific as market research goes, he insists it could give advertisers and marketers an inside track on those in the media industry.

"The objective here is to create buzz in a very important community - the media - because what they say becomes important," Gauthier said.

Gauthier said the beauty of the game format is that it can easily be changed to accommodate other industries or audiences, allowing the company to brand its game to any target group advertisers are interested in wooing.

In fact, a spokesman for the company's own PR firm said e-tractions.com was considering a host of similar games, including one called "whack-a-hack," where PR flacks could vent their frustrations against high profile reporters and writers who never accept phone calls or press releases.

A final caveat: The game requires a Macromedia plug-in, and although the site has links to the free download if you don't already have it, the 656K file could take a few minutes if your Internet connection is a slow one.

e-tractions can be found online at http://www.e-tractions.com

Reported by Newsbytes, http://www.newsbytes.com