Boomroom: McVities
Creating a buzz around biscuits with the Penguin BoomRoom
McVities wanted to enhance awareness for their leading Penguin Biscuit brand, so Tangent 90 created an interactive website named ‘The Penguin Boomroom’. Aimed at 9-13 year olds, BoomRoom visitors were able to mix strange noises with music and also select dance moves for the Penguin character. The BoomRoom was supported with a UK wide on-pack promotion, with twelve million multi-packs printed with graphics, noise codes and, of course, the website URL.
All the music and dance sequences had to match perfectly. To do this Tangent 90 wrote four original music tracks, while the animated Penguin character was drawn by hand - frame by frame - and then re-created on computer.
Users could save their mixes and send them to one another via email from within the site. They could also download screen savers and various wallpapers. With all this functionality and over 4 minutes of audio, the main obstacle was keeping the file sizes to a minimum. This was a mammoth task on its own and was achieved by being able to apply higher levels of audio compression to music we had written and created ourselves.
The site was a enormous hit. Cartoon Networks informed us that The BoomRoom had accounted for a third of all traffic visiting their website while the promotion lasted - a resounding success!! With the amazing success of Vol I, McVities commissioned an updated Vol II earlier than planned. The new site enjoyed a new 'look and feel', featured additional dance moves, two new music tracks, 18 new noises, a new game, a competition and even more downloads. It too was a roaring success!!