Xunbao: Searching for Treasure in Taipei – Mobile Photo Hunt Urban Gaming

Posted by Joel

The advertisements start chasing me from the second I step into my apartment elevator in the morning. Posters along each wall surround me coercing me to use their medicine to cure my cold or drink their soy milk to make my skin whiter. On the subway ride to work flat panel screens flash advertisements for Oil of Olay beauty cream. While I wait for the lift at work LCD panels replay the latest Motorola mobile phone handset commercial. Even when I log into my computer MSN pop-up ads try to convince me to buy something else I don’t want.

Advertisements can be intrusive and an annoyance, but what if instead of running away from them, we started actively chasing them? What if instead of having a negative association with a brand due to intrusive advertising, we had a positive association based on a pleasant memorable experience in which we physically engaged the brand?

These questions began popping into my head after an old friend and entrepreneur whom I met in Beijing, introduced me to Xunbao 寻宝 (“Treasure Hunt”) right as I was about to begin my Fulbright fellowship in Taiwan.

He sent me the link for iSpott.com, which at the time was a growing social network/mobile scavenger hunt game. iSpott users take mobile photos of an assigned object or idea, upload the photo to the website, then users vote for whose photo best satisfies the hunt using a 5 star rating system.

Initially, I didn’t think much about it, but then I saw an example of an interactive advertising campaign that iSpott created for Sprite, heard about Pacmanhattan, read this book on Smart Mobs, became a regular reader of this blog, and started researching this group among others. After going back and forth with him for a few months, I decided to go for it. We set out to make a Chinese version of iSpott, but we called it Xunbao.

The plan: my partner would work with web designers in Beijing to build a site and I would create a way to test it upon completion in Taiwan prior to releasing it on the mainland.

For the “test” I came up with the idea of The Blue Line Challenge a.k.a. 蓝线大挑战, an urban game and mobile scavenger hunt in which participants take photos with their mobile phone to satisfy a list of challenges. I thought this would be the best way to test the site’s core functionalities - mobile photo upload and photo rating - and also leave room to test the effectiveness of ad placement by having participants take photos alongside brands like McDonalds, 7-11 and Nokia.

For four months I spent my weeks calling and emailing prospective participants and partnering organizations, and my weekends running around Taipei passing out marketing material to strangers. In the end I was able to secure sponsorships, newspaper articles, and recruit 300 participants.

What did 300 people running around the streets of Taipei participating in The Blue Line Challenge look like?

Take a look for yourself HERE.

The Blue Line Challenge was a complete success. Given that I’m sure your next questions are: why aren’t white-collar 20-somethings running around Greater China “Xunbaoing” on the weekends today? Why didn’t you go on to open a location-based mobile marketing firm? These are questions that we can talk about the next time you come visit me in Singapore over a tall cup of coffee.

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