Cheetos: Chester Cheetah Goes Undercover
Client: Cheetos
Tools: Flash 8, Photoshop, Illustrator
Responsibilities: All Flash game programming, all database/Remoting programming, various content pieces, dynamic content ad units
Description: For 2006, Frito Lay sent Chester Cheetah undercover to find who stole his secret Cheetos recipe. Kids are invited to register as an agent to help Chester track down the culprits. Once registered with a custom user name and password, they can save their progress and scores through the games as well as enter to win a number of cool spygear prizes. As of the end of August, after 7 solid months online, the site has had 800,000 registered agents. A very basic online ad campaign featured 'news headlines' from the site, with a new piece to the puzzle released every single day. The ad units communicated with the site to determine the day in the campaign to display the appropriate copy.
Noteworthy facts: Hands down, the largest, most complicated project I've ever worked on. Executed on an extremely tight timeline with hard milestone dates throughout the campaign, we delivered 5 full phases of content starting with the launch on February 27, 2006. Due to legal restrictions in obtaining information from children, we devised a registration system with a series of anonymous questions that could later be used to retrieve a lost password. The whole site, particularly the registration process, makes heavy use of Flash Remoting to communicate large pieces of data back and forth quickly from a database. Traffic was so high during the initial launch of the campaign, we had to upgrade the web servers the site was running on to prevent them from crashing. Upon seeing just the initial launch of the site and the amount of content available, our general manager was quoted as saying "Large? You guys have created the f*%$ing Louvre." I'll take that as a compliment. In July of 2006 the Hot List, a publication about what's popular among different demographics, released favorite websites as named by kids 8-14. Cheetos was the only CPG brand to be on the list, alongside Barbie, Disney, and NeoPets.
Addition - 10.10.06: Winner of Adobe Site of the Day