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Silicon Alley Reporter, Issue 38 - November 2000
David Alm
Copyright 2000 RISING TIDE STUDIOS. All Rights Reserved.

The Mothers of Manipulation

In early August, a member of SAR's editorial staff sent an e-mail around the office with the subject line, "This is the site we've been waiting for." The message was linked to www.whackaflack,com, and it's the game of any journalist's dreams. After choosing from a list of top PR firms, including Fleishman Hillard, Ruder Finn, and Ogilvy PR, you're taken to the whacking room. Creepy figurines pop up from behind cubicle dividers like gophers at the mall arcade; your job is to exterminate the pests. Using press releases instead of a mallet, you gain points for every PR "flack" you hit.

For the curious journalist delighted by the idea of throwing press releases-cum-paper-airplanes at the relentless PR community, it doesn't take long to find out who's behind Whack-A-Flack. Boston-based e-tractions is the culprit. Founded in September 1999, the company develops entertainment-based marketing programs with the idea that if you want to keep customers coming back to your site, you have to show them a good time.

Using 20 basic game "templates," e-tractions can put together an appropriate game for any site within four weeks for a development fee of $20,000. The client then pays between $5,000 and $15,000 per month for optional ongoing services, such as conceptual consulting or analyses of the game's effectiveness.

So what and to whom is e-tractions trying to market with Whack-A-Flack? "I'm told you journalists have a love/hate relationship with PR people," says company co-founder Kim Shah. And knowing that journalists are always looking for that unavoidably interesting story, Shah shamelessly admits that they developed the game for one thing: press. Marketed via just 150 e-mails sent to random journalists around the country, Shah says 12,000 people visited the site within 10 days, and the company has received calls from writers as far away as Europe and the Far East.

So maybe we've been duped, played like marionette dolls by e-tractions. But if this project is any indication, this is a company that knows how to appeal to an audience.