The folks who make the Wilkinson Sword razor (I think more popular in Europe than here) have put a lot of effort and I suspect money into a new promotional site called Fight for Kisses. (The fightforkisses.com domain redirects to the much “easier” ffk-wilkinson.com.) First up is a long video of a super creepy baby (looks distantly related to the dancing baby) that gets all the attention from his sexy mom due to his soft baby skin. The father is always on the outs until he discovers the Wilkinson Sword that renders him on “equal footing” with the baby as they compete for mom’s attention. The whole video then leads you to a site of which the centerpiece is a 110MB Windows only video game download (requires registration).

So… I heard from some friends that they were impressed with the effort, so not only did I watch the video (the creepy 3d people only exceeded in creepiness by the Oedipal overtones) but I registered and downloaded the videogame. Normally we try not to write up when companies do advergames as they’re often so shallow and cheap as to really be disposable. But this video and game clearly required some significant investment. I would conservatively guess at least 2-3 million dollars not including promotion and marketing by the time they were done. Though even if they’d spent half that they still didn’t get their money’s worth. The game is horrible. Never mind the percentage of people you lose when you force them download a 110MB client, but even once I got it working it took three tries through the UI to finally get the game to work. And when it did it was quite bad. I’ll admit I was hunting and pecking to figure out the controls. But even with my fumbling around I got enough of a sense of the game that I didn’t want to even spend the 20 seconds it would take to properly learn the controls. After all, I knew the reward at the end was more of the same crappy 2D super badly done Street Fighter-ish fighting game between Dad and baby – the winner getting… mom?

This site is misguided on so many levels. Some questions for the folks at Wilkinson and their creative partners:

• Do you really think this game is any good? Do you believe anyone will play it more than once?
• Did you instrument the game so that you have any idea if anyone actually played it more than once? for more than a minute or two?
• Why did you need to include the video intro again in the game? I saw it on the website before I downloaded the game. Are you so proud of your work that I need to see the thing twice? (The “skip” button only appears after I’ve been subjected to the first 30 seconds of the video.)
• Is there anything about this game that couldn’t have been built in Flash and embedded in a website? Did I really need an OS specific download? This seems particularly bad.

If you want to spend millions of dollars on a promotional site centered around a game with no replayability then go hire the folks that built Get the Glass. At least that game a) ran in the browser, and b) was gorgeous.

I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but soon these advertisers and their agencies are going to realize that while building interesting branded experiences is definitely the way to go, these crappy short shelf-life sites are absolutely terrible, and a waste of money.

What if a fraction of that money was spent to either build or sponsor a site that actually a) did something interesting, b) had a reason for users to come back. I’m not saying this is a simple proposition, but for similar effort and less money at least Wilkinson would have a chance at getting more than a few minutes of their audiences time. If the site was really popular it could be exponentially more effective than “Fight for Kisses” with their initial cost being less, and users coming back again and again spreading the up front cost over countless minutes where users spend their time in an experience that reinforces Wilkinson’s messaging.

Some day, soon I believe, there will be a breakout hit along the lines of the type of app I’m discussing, and then companies will stop wasting their money on stuff like this.