DMNews: Web Game Ties Into Levi's Super Bowl Ad

Running along with Levi's Super Bowl XXXVII commercial, the San Francisco company's promotion will offer as prize an $85,000 gold-and-jewel-laden pair of Type 1 jeans and $65,000 in gold nuggets and cash.

"What we wanted to do was differentiate the Levi's Super Bowl spot from all the others and make a bold statement by doing something unique," said Jim Stone, director of interactive marketing at Levi's. […] For four weeks through Jan. 28, a different question will be posted weekly at levi.com. Correct answers give players access to clues about where the jeans are "buried" online. A series of games on the site also will help reveal clues. Weekly prizes of Type 1 jeans, jackets, sweatshirts or T-shirts will be offered to select players. […] London interactive agency Lateral created the online game.

I'm a fan of integrated campaigns. However, I question the choice to embed the contest in a javascript-launched popup, reducing the ability of users to specifically send it by e-mail/chat or post it to blogs, and shielding it from search engine indexing. Levi's is not even showing in the first 10 Google results for Levi's Type 1. This page will probably rank above theirs by the end of the week.

Levi's hasn't even a clue about clean URLs, looking at the crap their WebLogic server produces (in good compliance with Brent's Law of CMS URLs.) Those are URLs so long they're bound to break in many if not most e-mail clients (if they don't expire in the first place, since they include session variables.)

Here's an example for your edification:

http://www.us.levi.com/fal02a/levi/feature/stylewatch/l_style_feature.jsp?WebLogicSession=PhluHZ5tkgiz7pO7oB0hwDbEyBy1l5vAC9vRKLhU2bXL1il92xRA|-116571147445437421/169888387/6/7005/7005/7002/7002/7005/-1&FOLDER<>folder_id=2529837

And if the user has a pop-up killer, they won't even know about the contest from the US site's front page.

This is what happens when you work with marketers who don't understand the technical platform they're supposed to leverage.