Tap Joint
- Brand
- Yahoo
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Tech & Telecom
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Pereira & O'Dell
Objective
Yahoo was launching "Electric City," a brand-new animated series with no built-in audience, and needed to build buzz before a single episode existed publicly. Rather than buy awareness with trailers, the brand wanted the show's world to be discovered and decoded by the audience most likely to evangelize it — hardcore gamers and puzzle solvers — so the story would spread through gaming forums, blogs and social feeds ahead of the premiere.
Solution
Players land on tapjoint.com with no instructions, inside a hidden underground room where an antique telegraph machine starts clattering out coded transmissions. They have to recognize the taps as a cipher, decode it, and tap answers back to unlock story fragments and video revealing the city's factions and its resistance. A companion mobile site doubles as the desktop version's instruction manual, so cracking the code means working both screens at once. Over nine days new transmissions keep arriving, and players compare notes and coordinate decoding in their own forums, Facebook groups and around the @tapjoint Twitter account, until their collective effort unlocks an advance preview of the first "Electric City" episode.
Results
TapJoint.com drew 1 million page views and 300,000 unique visitors, who spent an average of 30 minutes per return visit. The cipher at the campaign's core — expected to take players three weeks to crack — was fully decoded in eight days, within the nine-day run.
- 1
Before any branding appears, the game surfaces through unbranded ad banners on gaming sites and anonymous envelopes mailed to select bloggers, with no mention of Yahoo or the show behind it.
- 2
Following the clues lands the player on tapjoint.com, dropped without explanation into a dark underground room called the Tap Joint; there is no play button, only an antique telegraph machine standing as the sole interface.
- 3
The telegraph taps out an incoming message from an unseen member of the city's resistance; recognizing it as tap code, the player has to find the cipher key on the site's mobile version, which functions as the instruction manual for the desktop experience.
- 4
The core loop is decode-and-respond: the player translates the tapped message, then keys back an answer in the same code, and a correct response moves the conversation forward.
- 5
Correct answers unlock story content — the city's heroes and villains, the ruling Allied Municipal Patrol, and video clips — gradually revealing the resistance's plan to send the whole city a message by a day called Illumination Day.
- 6
New transmissions arrive once a day across nine days, so a single visit only yields part of the cipher and the player has to keep returning to progress.
- 7
The game extends past the site itself: mobile updates and the @tapjoint Twitter account continue the story, and players band together on forums, Facebook pages, and Twitter threads to pool a shared glossary of the cipher.
- 8
Once the community works through the full chain of messages, it unlocks the reward: an early preview of the first episode of Electric City ahead of its premiere.
