Tap Joint
- Brand
- Electric City
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Plan8
- With
- Pereira & O'Dell
- With
- Feels Like
Objective
Yahoo! needed to build buzz ahead of the July 17, 2012 premiere of its first original series, Tom Hanks's dystopian animated show 'Electric City,' and to pull an audience onto its own Yahoo! Screen platform before launch day. Rather than court a broad audience, the campaign was built for savvy fanboys and hardcore gamers — a core that would dig into a puzzle and carry it across forums and social media themselves.
Solution
Players arrive at tapjoint.com, an unbranded site staged as an underground hideout, and sit down at an antique telegraph machine. Messages come in tap code, which players decode against a cipher to reveal, fragment by fragment, the story of a city, its people, and a coming revolution. New clues keep surfacing outside the site itself — in banner ads on gaming sites, on the @tapjoint Twitter account, on mobile, even in anonymous letters mailed to bloggers — so players compare notes and reassemble the story together on their own forums, Facebook groups, and fan wikis. The puzzle runs nine days, and cracking it as a group unlocks a preview of the first episode of 'Electric City.'
Results
The campaign drew 1 million page views and 300,000 unique visitors, with returning players averaging 30 minutes per session; players cracked the full puzzle in eight days, well ahead of the three weeks organizers had expected it to take.
- 1
A cryptic banner ad on gaming sites, or an anonymous letter mailed to a blogger, carries no mention of the show or brand — just a lead pointing to tapjoint.com.
- 2
Following it, the player lands not on a show's promo page but inside a hidden underground room called the Tap Joint, taking on the role of a resistance member whom the room's occupants already treat as one of their own.
- 3
The room's only interface is an antique telegraph device: incoming messages arrive as tap code, which the player decodes to read them, then answers in the same code, with correctly encoded replies advancing the exchange.
- 4
Each decoded exchange unlocks another piece of backstory, gradually revealing the city, its heroes and villains, and the revolution building against them.
- 5
Some clues live off the site entirely, sending players to the campaign's Twitter account and mobile channels to keep the trail going.
- 6
The puzzles are too dense for a lone player, so participants organize on forums, Facebook groups, and fan wikis to pool decoded messages and clues.
- 7
Over nine days of incoming messages, the community works the code to its end and unlocks a preview of the first episode, at which point the game's tie-in to the show is finally revealed.
