GoldPocket.com Kicks Off $15 Million Campaign for Game Show

Start-up GoldPocket.com on Tuesday launched a major marketing effort to raise awareness about a weekly online game show in which it’s giving away a million dollars.

The first game debuts Sunday, May 21, and the company is spending $15 million to get a critical mass of participants.

The national campaign, designed by Holland Mark Edmund Ingalls, includes television, radio, print, interactive, outdoor advertising, and guerilla marketing.

The theme — playing off the popularity of television game shows like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” — is that anyone can play, and anyone can win. The tagline is, “It’s your turn to play for a million.”

The print campaign features classic 60’s style game show lettering with test like, “Years of getting the right answer, and not even a parting gift to show for it.”

The television ads focus on the fact that players can participate from their own homes. In “Karate,” a young man clad in workout clothes slurps a bowl of cereal and does karate moves around the room between questions.

Guerilla marketing efforts will include appearances by a person dressed as Big Foot in certain markets. The character will wear a GoldPocket.com sandwich board emblazoned with the words: Your chances of getting on a game show are about as good as seeing bigfoot.

Although the company is concentrating initially on building an audience for its game show, the company hopes to use it to highlight its technology, which allows millions of people to simultaneously participate in a real-time interactive event.