AdME stands for "Advertising-driven Mobile Entertainment" and the company has just launched GuitarStar, a music-driven mobile game akin to Guitar Hero. Games On Deck talks to AdME director of marketing Christopher Payne-Taylor about the company's plans for the title as a platform for emerging bands and established brands.
Games On Deck: Tell us about AdME.
Christopher Payne-Taylor: AdME started out as the development and marketing arm for a project called mdME (music-driven Mobile Entertainment) initiated two years ago by SONiVOX, a leading sound design/development company. Spun off earlier this year, AdME is now a separate company that is developing and marketing these products as both games in and of themselves as well as promotional platforms for recording artists and consumer brands. AdME's first mobile entertainment product, GuitarStar, was just released on the AT&T Wireless network and we are presently in negotiations with a broad array publishers, carriers, brand manufacturers and recording labels to distribute GuitarStar worldwide.
GOD: What is "advertising driven mobile content"?
CPT: Advertising-driven mobile content is material that is centered or "wrapped" around a recording artist or consumer brand. For instance, GuitarStar comes with a standard AdME character called Stevie Gibbs. However, other GuitarStar packages are available based on emerging artists in our current stable. Now, record labels are interested in doing the same thing with their key artists. Moreover, a number of leading advertising agencies are interested in adapting the AdME platform to promote their clients' consumer brands. So it may not be long before we see, for example, a Dunkin' Donuts GuitarStar package with a large, hollowed-out guitar player wailing away on a new "Dunkin's Rockin'" campaign theme song.
GOD: Why did you decide to enter this market?
CPT: We actually started as a technology developer with audio synthesis and "beat matching" technologies that now underlie all AdME mobile products. Early on, we built a few gaming applications just to demonstrate these technologies. But after some test marketing, it appeared they were good enough to be sold as "games" in their own right, so we did some core branding and marketing work ... et voila! We had GuitarStar and another dance-oriented product called DanceLord, which functions somewhat like a mobile Dance Dance Revolution. But the real breakthrough came when we realized these were both not just mobile games in and of themselves, but platforms capable of serving as a whole new kind of promotional platform in the emerging mobile space.
There are two kinds of advertising related mobile content. One is advertising solution, where a banner or other type of ad is served from within a mobile app. The other is a branded solution, where the artist or brand is completely "wrapped," meaning that the brand "owns" the application. We chose to cast our lot with the latter because of awareness that, in the advertising industry, there are two concepts beginning to take precedence over all else: branding and engagement. The first "advertising" solution is limited on both counts. AdME, on the other hand, provides an ideal "branded" environment for the delivery of both.
GOD: Tell us about GuitarStar in more detail.
CPT: GuitarStar is a mobile entertainment application in the mold of Guitar Hero. Based on its proprietary "beat-matching" technology, GuitarStar is the first mobile game fully capable of synchronizing visual movements with the beat of the underlying musical soundtrack in order to significantly amplify the player's level of gaming engagement. This enables players to virtually "play by feel" rather than taking their cues solely from what they see, as they attempt to capture guitar picks flying across the mobile screen. In addition to AdME characters, Stevie Gibbs and Violet Rayne, a number of real-world emerging bands are currently available, with more well-known, mainstream acts poised to follow.
GuitarStar
GOD: How does the "beat-matching" gameplay work on mobile?
CPT: To maintain the level of audio and visual synchronization necessary for an acceptable level of gameplay, AdME has employed an interactive music library implemented as a middleware layer on top of a phone's audio drivers. This handles the complexity of managing multiple audio streams and sound content. It also facilitates the creation of audio content and gameplay information with standard software tools that can then be translated into "beat-matched" files which automatically compensate for the audio differences on each individual handset.
