Building Financial Literacy
The spokesperson for the Credit Union National Association, CUNA, was the Little Guy. While the Little Guy was all things good, an advocate in financial planning, and a paragon of transparency and fairness, his Nemesis, the Banker, was a jerk.
The political consulting and advocacy advertising firm, GMMB, approached Bluecadet with the challenge of creating a series of fun games and interactive experiences to bring the Little Guy and the Banker to life.
a bellicose, bloviating blowhard
The Ask the Banker interactive was a fun little toy and small feat of technology. By typing into a field a user could ask the banker any question and he would come up with an appropriate, albeit obnoxious, response.
How I did it
In order to accomplish this, we created a custom language recognition program. This program parses people’s input and tests it against a series of word and phrase filters.
Once it has determined the subject of the question, the program serves up an applicable response pulling from over three hundred video clips. Each of these clips is tracked to ensure that visitors get a new snarky response with each inquiry.
how it turned out
With all of this technology chugging in the background, the experience is fluid and fun, as people logged long visits just to get insulted by this bellicose, bloviating blowhard.
A staunch advocate for fair banking
The Little Guy, the spokesperson for CUNA, was a proverbial everyman. He stood with and as any person who opposes credit fraud. The game gave this everyman status a fun, albeit literal, spin by allowing people to dress the Little Guy in a variety of outfits in a range of different situations.
With a series of fun, interchangeable props and scenes, people outfit the Little Guy in any number of ways. People then downloaded their creations as desktop wallpaper, distributed the Little Guy via Facebook, sent him to colleagues via email, etc.
In a second iteration, we introduced simple gamification with Find the Little Guy. For one week we posted photos with a life-sized cutout of Little Guy in different locations around DC. People returned daily to guess where he was, and those who answered correctly each day were entered into a lottery for CUNA swag.
How I did it
The execution was straightforward. I mapped out the experience, defined the states, and the team brought in an illustrator to create the assets.
The challenge came from working with a new feature in Flash: the ability to capture screenshots and render them as files that a person can save. This introduced the hurdle of managing security issues browsers and operating systems had with downloading images from the Flash player.