Get On Board is the latest branded software experience to come across our screens. (See our index of branded interactive experiences). Built to support the new movie Evan Almighty (sequel to Bruce Almighty) the site is much closer to our definition of Branded Software than some of the other sites coming out these days. It’s worth taking a look.

The primary positive (and negative) thing about the site is that it actually does something. Picking up on the environmental theme of the movie (at least I assume that’s where the theme comes from) the site is all about saving the environment and what you can do. However, the highlight is that for $5 you can plant a tree. Not only do you get to plant a real tree, but you get a virtual one on their series of Second-Life-ish islands. Neat. You get to badge the tree to represent yourself, and you can browse the islands seeing all the trees planted by other folks including the corporate sponsors who appear to have planted entire groves. The fact that you can actually do something on the site, even something like planting a virtual/real tree is really a leap forward relative to most of the sites being put out by brand advertisers. And the execution isn’t terrible either… the design is quite attractive. Very cool stylized graphics. That said, the site is somewhat “out-of-phase” for me and there are a few small things they could have done to make it way way better.

• The tree-planting experience, christened “The Almighty Forest”, while it’s the first link in the navigation, it’s not the focus of the site. The rest of the site is wrapped up with all this random eco-content. Including an anemic carbon calculator and all sorts of advice. It’s like the tree-planting is an overgrown mini-game. The creators/sponsors of the site should have realized… the tree-planting IS the site. It’s what the entire experience should have been, not just component among all the other elements. Focus would be very helpful here.
• Perhaps because of the lack of focus, not nearly enough attention was given to the tree planting experience from an interaction perspective. The islands are super difficult to browse. They constantly pause to reload the UI, the experience forces a popup window (not sure why), the controls are odd, and the whole 3d metaphor is adding no value and only complexity to browsing the forests.
• Finally, there’s not huge reason to come back here once you’ve planted a tree or browsed other people’s trees. There’s search functionality built-in that looks like its for searching for people who have planted trees. I honestly doubt that this site will ever acheive enough critical mass that you’ll be searching for your friends on here thinking there’s even a fraction of a chance you’ll find them. (Using it hung my browser for a solid 60 seconds of Flash trying to figure out what it was doing.) And of course the time spent on this functionality could have been spent implementing ways to get people to return to the site over and over again.

Sometimes I think that if the people who developed this (I can’t tell if Universal had any outside help on this site) thought about this as real software instead of as a marketing piece they might see the real possibilities of the medium. But as long as these experiences are looked at as marketing collateral, they will never realize the true levels of engagement, loyalty, and brand awareness generation that we believe are possible as well as much more cost-effective. And of course, it’s not clear that making this experience be one that had “legs” would have been any more experience than building it with a short shelf-life.

As always, I’m incredibly curious as to the economics of this effort as well as how its sponsors are measuring success. And also as always, I suspect their costs were high, their results were marginal, and they’re happy with them since there is no baseline to which they can compare in a reasonable way. Hopefully this will change as this form of advertising expression evolves.