Bong! Knocking
out pesky allergens.
Touch-screen pinball game in a Times Square window
By Toni Fitzgerald
May 27, 2010
These days pinball machines are seen as relics of a bygone era, relegated to the back of a restaurant or the occasional arcade.
Not this machine. It was sleek, with a digital display, and humongous, 12 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
It was also impossible to miss, splashed across a bank of windows in Times Square.
The concept was the same as the old three-dimensional pinball games. You try to keep the ball pinging around the machine for as long as possible, racking up your score, before it falls down the hole at the bottom.
Passersby stopped to watch, and some queued up for a turn. To play they simply pressed a button on the touch screen on the window, which shot the ball into play. Other buttons controlled the flippers. Those with the highest scores earned the right to enter their initials onto the machine's screen.
The giant pinball machine was a stunt to promote the release of Zyrtec's new liquid gels.
What made the machine unique, besides its size and presence on a storefront, was the game itself. In regular pinball, the object is to bounce the ball off targets, such as bumpers, that drive up one's score.
In this game, the targets were common allergens: dandelions, flowers and adorable, dander-emitting puppy dogs. The aim was to illustrate how Zyrtec is able to target and knock out the common allergens that make life miserable for allergy sufferers.
Zyrtec wanted a campaign that would quite literally stop passersby in their tracks, and JWT and the creative team at Monster Media came up with the idea of a giant pinball machine.
"Something interactive is not something that's typically seen in Times Square," says Chris Beauchamp, CEO of Monster Media. "We did it in Times Square because we figured everything is bigger in Times Square."
The pinball machine was made up of eight 46-inch rectangular screens placed close together in a storefront display.
The stunt ran from March 21 to April 17, drawing 36,000 players.
The idea worked as a clever play on how allergy medications knock out offending allergens.
The people who stopped to watch the game had no trouble making the connection.
"It created a traffic jam," Beauchamp says. "People were waiting to play, and they were reading the screen with the Zyrtec logo and watching the action while they were waiting."
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