Scrabble will invite visitors to celebrate how words and language have evolved over its 70-year history with a pop-up in the lower ground atrium of Westfield London on Sunday 28th October from 12-8pm.

The exhibition examines the past, present and future of Scrabble through different immersive experiences in each giant 3D Scrabble tile.

At the International Space Station, astronauts are encouraged to practice little habits and activities that remind them of home. Psychologists recognise such behaviour as being fundamental to maintaining an astronaut’s mental health and peace of mind. Playing Scrabble is one of the most popular of these spacetime activities, but there’s just one problem: no gravity.

To counter the gravity problem, the pop-up will unveil the Scrabble Space Edition, specially designed to be played in orbit. With magnetic tiles fashioned from meteorite rock, this board allows astronauts to play their favourite game no matter where they are in the galaxy.

A transparent cubed tile will also show the tense World Scrabble Championship Finale live at 12pm as the two best players in the world go head to head to lay the highest score and take the trophy. Fans will also get the opportunity to hone their skills by facing off against one of the world’s greatest players.

There will also be the opportunity to walk through seven huge Scrabble cubed tiles to discover a visual history of Scrabble and it’s fun and irreverent use in pop culture through films, TV and by celebrity fans. Scrabble celebrates how new additions to the English language lexicon make for surprising official Scrabble play words including ‘selfie’ and ‘fitspiration,’ while visitors can vote for which word they want to see included in the next Scrabble dictionary.

The pop-up is just one piece on the board of 70^th celebrations, that include a cultural film that brings together the UK’s brightest and most interesting young wordsmiths – rappers, poets and writers –  to explore the evolution of language and words through the lens of Scrabble.

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Baby and toddler food brand Kiddylicious has created a new version of its popular online game, Wafer Wipeout, with new graphics, ingredients and prizes. The Candy Crush-style game was originally launched last year to raise awareness of the brand’s range of Wafer products amongst parents of young babies.

Wafer Wipeout challenges players to smash through rows and columns of Wafer packs and ingredients. For a period following the launch of the updated app, those who manage to hit the magic number of 1,000 points in 60 seconds could enter their details for the chance to win a range of prizes, including high chairs, plate sets and weaning kits.

Kiddylicious Wafers are designed to be the ideal first solid food for babies. Each Wafer is the perfect size for little hands to hold, and are crumb-free, which makes them a great weaning snack for little ones. They come in four flavours – strawberry, blueberry, carrot and banana – and contain no allergens, added preservatives or artificial colours.

The agency behind the campaign is Bath-based Ready, specialists in promotional and tactical campaigns for consumer brands.

Ready’s creative director Jake Xu says: “We had brilliant feedback from parents on the original Wafer Wipeout game. So it seemed only natural to give it a makeover and offer a fresh range of great prizes to be won. With several new parents in the Ready office, we know first-hand how great Wafers are during the weaning stage. On that front, we are also working with Kiddylicious on a range of informative content to support parents during the weaning stage. So we’re excited to reveal this very soon.”

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McDonald’s has signed a deal with The Smiley Company, master licensee for the Rubik’s Cube, for the iconic 1980s puzzle toy to feature in McDonald’s Happy Meal offers in multiple countries.

In a deal brokered by global customer engagement agency The Marketing Store, which has worked closely with McDonald’s for many years, the multi-territory promotion will appear in McDonald’s restaurants across various European countries, the Middle East, Africa and North America.

The campaign launches in France this month (July 2018) and will then roll out across other territories from August through November 2018, including Italy, Spain, Austria, UAE and Canada, amongst many others.

It is not clear yet whether it will be running in the UK, where restrictions are in force on the use of toys and licensed characters to promote food and drink products. Promomarketing has asked McDonald’s for clarification on this point.

Unusually, the Happy Meal Box will be transformed from its traditional tented ‘house’ design into a Cube shape to mirror the Rubik’s Cube for the duration of the campaign.

Children enjoying a Happy Meal at participating McDonald’s will have a choice of four different bespoke Rubik’s Cube toys; including square 2×2 cubes and rectangular 3×2 cubes as well as rounded versions of these, with a total of 12 different toys to choose from.

The unique promotion will also feature a product mash-up between Rubik’s and a major Hollywood animation film studio’s properties appearing on the toys alongside the iconic Rubik’s Cube colours and trademark twist and turn mechanism.

Nicolas Loufrani, CEO at The Smiley Company, says: “We have worked closely with The Marketing Store and the whole team at McDonald’s and are really pleased with the innovative and high quality content of this campaign. From the robust mini Cubes and the unique Rubik’s Cube shaped Happy Meal box to the TV ads and bespoke games created for the Happy Studio app, every aspect of the promotion has been crafted to perfectly leverage the Rubik’s brand mission of encouraging children to PLAY SMART and further our goal of bringing intelligent play to kids of all ages.”

The Smiley Company will be leveraging the partnership with McDonald’s to drive the ongoing Rubik’s brand extension program and “to realise our plans to take the brand to new consumers, with particular emphasis on engaging the brand with children aged from 3-8 years old, as our brand mission continues to focus on creating new toy partnerships for this age group,” Loufrani adds.

To support the promotion’s launch in the markets where it will be appearing, there will be a 360° marketing campaign, supported by a TV advertising featuring the Happy Meal mascot ‘HAPPY’ playing with a Rubik’s Cube in a 26 and 13 second spots. There will also be series of ‘How to Solve’ short video tutorials launched on social channels to help kids solve the bespoke Happy Meal Rubik’s Cubes, and a McDonald’s Happy Studio app takeover.

Additional marketing materials will include in-store POS, branded balloons, colouring sheets, wall stickers and window decals which will help amplify the Rubik’s brand identity throughout the promotion.

The launch of the activation in France is being supported with an influencers’ campaign while other national markets will also see major marketing initiatives.

The Smiley Company is a brand licensing company which originated in France and which holds the intellectual property rights to the classic smiley face symbol face symbol in more than 100 countries (although not the United States, where the symbol originated).

In addition to the smiley symbol, it also holds licensing rights for Rubik’s Cube and related properties, and recently launched a major brand extension program for Rubik’s. This draws on Rubik’s iconicity, rich heritage and archive and the resurgence of retro gaming and geek culture, while utilising Smiley’s own industry leading design studio and world class distribution channels.

The company says global demand for Rubik’s is now at the highest levels since its launch in 1980 and a number of industry leading partners have already signed up across categories including apparel, back to school, gift, live events and attractions, partworks, promotions and publishing.

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Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) has linked up with video game publisher EA and its market leading football game FIFA 18, for a massive on-pack promotion celebrating the soft drink brand’s sponsorship of the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Running across the whole Coca-Cola portfolio, the promotion – designed to appeal to the 14 million people expected to tune in for each game – will see unique codes printed on promotional packs of Coca-Cola Classic and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar from now until June 17th. Consumers can enter the codes online to unlock exclusive in-game content within FIFA 18 for the Xbox One and PlayStation4 consoles. They will also be entered into a draw to win a rare player and Coca-Cola jersey for their team.

CCEP says research shows that more than half the UK population are planning to watch this year’s World Cup.

The promotion will be supported by a £2.5 million marketing campaign that includes POS, digital, social and out-of-home advertising.

Simon Harrison, customer marketing director at Coca-Cola European Partners, says: “89% of consumers watched the 2016 UEFA Euros at home and 33% consumed soft drinks during matches. Our latest promotion is designed to capture the excitement of the nation ahead of the 2018 FIFA World Cup by partnering with the world’s biggest sporting game.”

Coca-Cola European Partners is the world’s largest independent Coca-Cola bottler. CCEP is the sole licensed bottler for products of The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) in Andorra, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, Luxemburg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

CCEP makes, sells and delivers the following products in GB for TCCC: Coca-Cola Classic, Diet Coke, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Fanta, Dr Pepper, Sprite, Schweppes, Fuze Tea, HONEST, AdeZ, Abbey Well, glacéau smartwater, Powerade, Oasis and Appletiser. In GB, it also makes, sells or delivers Monster, Relentless and Capri-Sun.

The Coca-Cola Company is one of the longest-standing corporate partners of FIFA, with a formal association since 1974 and an official sponsorship of the FIFA World Cup that began in 1978. Coca-Cola has had stadium advertising at every FIFA World Cup since 1950. FIFA and The Coca-Cola Company have now extended their long-time partnership to 2030.

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Savoury snack brand Mattessons Fridge Raiders has partnered with the world’s biggest gaming franchise, Call of Duty, for the launch of Code Strike, a mobile game that will test gamers’ code breaking skills.

The promotional campaign supports the global launch of Call of Duty WWII. It was created by Saatchi & Saatchi London.

Special promotional Call of Duty packs of Fridge Raiders will also be available on shelf with UK exclusive 2XP codes which will enhance the gaming experience. These codes can only be redeemed by downloading the Code Strike app.

Set within Bletchley Park during WWII and created in partnership with Bletchley Park Trust and The National Museum of Computing, Code Strike features numerous puzzles which have all been specially designed to test key abilities required to be a real code breaker, such as: reaction speeds, memory recall and reasoning plus computational thinking.

The game has been designed to reflect and celebrate Britain’s history of code-breaking and in particular the efforts of the Allied war effort during WWII. In 1942, Bletchley Park recruited a team of code breakers with a cryptic crossword featured in The Daily Telegraph. It was in this iconic location that Alan Turing, regarded as the father of modern computing, and other Allied code breakers broke the German Enigma code.

Included within Code Strike is a hidden challenge that only the most capable of code-breakers will be able to unlock. In partnership with Cyber Security Challenge UK, an initiative established to strengthen the national pool of cyber skills, 15 elite codebreakers will be fast tracked to a prestigious face-to-face competition, and could even be recruited into the next generation of cyber defenders.

Building on last year’s campaign, Snacker Hacker, which taught 70,000 coding lessons to teen gamers, this initiative is the fourth campaign from Fridge Raiders to target the gaming community.

Alastair Gibbons, Senior Brand Manager at Mattesons brand owner Kerry Foods, says: “Our ambition is to make fridge raiders to gaming what popcorn is to film. Over the past five years we’ve seen significant commercial and brand-health growth from targeting gamers and we’re excited to see the success of our Call Of Duty partnership over the next coming months.”

Will John, Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi London, adds: “We’ve always looked to collaborate with gamers, to showcase their creativity and skills. We’ve let them co-create a meat-snacking helmet. We’ve helped them develop an A.I. robot. We’ve even taught them how to code. Now we’re powering them up into code breakers.”

The campaigns are rooted in research that revealed that 61% of UK teens game and snack after school – and that when they get home, they open the fridge door first. This latest work supports Mattessons’ ambition to make Fridge Raiders the ultimate protein-rich gaming snack for hungry teens.

To launch Code Strike, three 30 second films have been created for VOD and Social, targeting gamers on Twitch and gaming YouTube channels and will also appear at DOOH sites at Tesco and ASDA stores nationwide as well as in selected Student Unions.

Continuing the relationship with YouTuber Ali A, which began with the successful FRHANK campaign for Fridge Raiders in 2014, Mattessons has created a Facebook live event to launch the app.

The Code Strike APP is available now to download on iOS and Android.

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Hasbro’s PLAY-DOH brand is visiting cities across the UK this summer with its Imagination Tour roadshow, encouraging families to have fun and be creative with the PLAY-DOH brand through a number of hands-on activities.

The tour, created for PLAY-DOH by experiential agency iD, started in Southampton on April 19 2017 and will be visiting six different locations:

• Geronimo Festival, Warrington – May 27-29
• Westfield, Stratford – July 26-30
• Metrocentre, Newcastle – August 2-6
• Bristol Balloon Fiesta – August 10-13
• Birmingham Bullring – September 13-17

The interactive event has been designed to give curious thinkers and little explorers the opportunity to experience creative play with PLAY-DOH compound, Hasbro says. Entering through a giant PLAY-DOH tub, children can head straight to the play tables where they can create anything they wish with endless pots of PLAY-DOH compound at their fingertips.

Next, they can test their culinary creativity at the Kitchens Creations station where they can make wacky food creations. Once complete, they can share their culinary masterpieces at the photo board for a special picture with the Doh-Doh brand character as a keepsake.

They will also have the chance to try out PLAY-DOH TOUCH, the immersive app that brings sculpted PLAY-DOH creations to life in a new virtual PLAY-DOH world.

Hasbro is a global play and entertainment company which makes toys, games, television, movies, digital gaming and consumer products including Nerf, My Little Pony, Transformers, PLAY-DOH, Monopoly, Littlest Pet Shop and Magic: The Gathering, as well as premier partner brands.

iD is a multi-award winning specialist experiential and retail marketing agency which delivers large scale sampling campaigns, road shows, and immersive brand experience campaigns for clients including Britvic, PepsiCo, Mars and Unilever. Additionally, iD provides teams of highly-trained expert demonstrators in retailers throughout the UK for clients including Nespresso, Microsoft, Revlon, Elizabeth Arden, COTY and Sage Appliances.

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Xbox has installed a series of Christmas lights that form the first-ever game trailer consumers can actually walk through. The lights – installed in the shopping plaza in London’s Brunswick Centre – don’t feature traditional festive imagery. Instead, they tell a story about hordes of flesh-eating zombies, to promote the new Christmas-themed zombie game Dead Rising 4.

The game was developed by Capcom and published in partnership with Microsoft. It launched on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC on December 6^th 2016.

The night before the official launch, the game’s online fan-base worked together to switch on the lights. By interacting with a cryptic Facebook Live stream of a zombie hand suspended above a button, Xbox followers moved the hand downward to press the switch and turn on the display, revealing the trailer to the world.

Created by advertising agency McCann London, the Dead Rising Lights consist of nine panels of lights, suspended consecutively above a busy shopping plaza. The lights switch on and off in sequence to reveal a brand new narrative to gamers. As with all Xbox game trailers, it begins with the PEGI age rating logo and concludes with the iconic green Xbox end-frame.

The direct-response switch-on mechanism was part of a fully-integrated campaign revolving around the light installation, comprising:

• Live streaming on Facebook Live, Twitch and Periscope.
• A festive event to mark the turning-on of the trailer.
• Geo-fenced Snapchat filters.
• An immersive, interactive 360° video so that those unable to visit the London installation can remotely experience it.

Adrian Simons, Director of Global Windows and Devices at Microsoft, says: “Most Christmas lights are switched on by celebrities, but in this case the honour went to Xbox’s global fan-base. And they are not just any lights, they bring to life a new form of game trailer which we believe is a world first. This is a fun, bold and innovative undertaking in keeping with our commitment to our fans – and it’s all done in the true spirit of the game.”

Laurence Thomson, Chief Creative Officer at McCann London, adds: “We wanted to reinvent the game trailer to connect with today’s gamers. What better way to celebrate the festive season and the launch of Dead Rising 4 than a gory Zombie apocalypse lit up in glorious technicolor? By subverting the traditional Christmas light display, we’re kicking the schmaltzy Christmas advert out of the window and instead appealing to gamers’ tongue-in-cheek attitude.”

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Hasbro is running a shopping centre tour across the UK in the run up to Christmas to showcase the cutting-edge motion technology in its new Bop It! game, giving consumers the chance to try out its 10 new ‘moves’ and share the fun through social media.

Bop It! delivers a series of commands that players must follow to win. The classic pull it, twist it and bop it actions have now grown to include a whole new range of moves, such as Whip It, Drink It, Selfie It, Answer It, Hammer It, Sing It, Golf It, Cradle It, Comb It and Saw It! And the autumn 2016 Bop It! experience, created and run by real world marketing agency Sense, challenges shoppers to try the new actions and ‘prove they’ve got the moves’.

“The central feature of this fun and cheeky 10-week tour is the ‘GIF It A Go!’ booth, where visitors can try out the latest Bop It! moves and have them turned into a funny GIF video for social sharing,” explained Sense Senior Account Director Nick Swift. “Those who share their GIFs online get a chance to win their choice of Hasbro Gaming games, while a partnership with toy retailer The Entertainer pushes consumers in-store to collect their prizes.”

The Bop It! experience will be live at UK shopping centres across October, November and into December.

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PlayStation UK is running a nationwide tour aimed at bringing its Virtual Reality titles to gamers.

Visiting six locations throughout the UK, The Future of Play Tour features a series of experiential PlayStation 4 events offering gamers the opportunity to participate in the immersive world of PlayStation VR.

The roadshow kicked off at the end of September with a launch at EGX, the UK’s biggest gaming event, which took place at Birmingham’s NEC, followed by two pop up experiences in Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow and Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield.

The tour, put together for PlayStation by experiential specialists Circle Agency, has been designed to allow the maximum number of visitors to be able to trial, with 20 playable stations available for both pre-booked appointments and walk in trials.

Circle Agency and PlayStation then transformed East London events space Kachette into an immersive venue where fans could experience a range of PlayStation VR titles. As part of the official launch week celebrations, the pop up event was open from Wednesday October 12^th through Sunday October 16^th. Titles which gamers were able to sample included race game DRIVECLUB VR, Gotham-themed adventure Batman: Arkham VR, survival horror Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and alien shooter Farpoint.

Outside of the PlayStation VR area, gamers were also able to see the latest cutting-edge technology from Sony up close, with the PlayStation 4 Pro, the world’s most powerful console, on display before its official launch on November 10^th.

A host of experienced brand ambassadors were on hand to walk visitors through the games and offer advice on the PlayStation VR headset, the PlayStation 4 consoles and accessories.

Tom Whitaker, Group Marketing Manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment UK, said: “PlayStation VR changes the way we play games and trying it is fundamental to understand that. We wanted to let as many people as possible experience The Future of Play Tour, to showcase what PlayStation has in store this year.” 

Claire Stokes, Founder and Managing Director at Circle Agency, added: “If ever there was a product that suited an experiential marketing strategy at launch, this is it.  Virtual Reality is a product that is extremely difficult to comprehend without the opportunity to experience it first-hand.  Being able to provide that opportunity for gamers nationwide has been an absolute thrill.”

The Future of Play Tour is set to appear at Cabot Circus in Bristol from October 20^th to 23^rd and then at the Old Granada Studios in Manchester from 27^th to 30^th October.

There is also a supporting website, www.trypsvr.com.

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The Entertainer, the fastest-growing high street multichannel toy retailer in the UK, is running a competition offering the chance to win one of everything listed in its 2016 Christmas catalogue, worth more than £13,300.

The toy store chain has also just celebrated its 35th birthday on Saturday 8th October with a range of in-store events and a Scratch Card giveaway with nearly 50,000 prizes to be won.

Customers at all 126 of the group’s UK stores had the chance to participate in exciting promotional activities including money-off offers, giveaways, competitions and celebratory balloons and stickers.

The Entertainer also launched its 2016 48-page Christmas catalogue, which, for the first time ever, includes a special competition for the chance to win the entire contents of the catalogue.

Gary Grant, Managing Director and Founder of The Entertainer, said: “We are thrilled to be celebrating our 35th birthday milestone this October and the fun in all our stores on Saturday 8th is our way of saying thank you to all our customers – big and small – for their loyalty to The Entertainer. We will continue to bring fun filled events nationwide and maintain our commitment to children and the importance of play.”

The Entertainer is also just about to launch its first-ever Christmas advertising campaign. It appointed multichannel marketing agency bigdog to handle its advertising account in August, after a three-way pitch. The new 30 and 10 second ads will air from early October through to December.

The Entertainer employs over 1,200 staff across its 126 stores and a further 160 in its Head Office in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. It also has a successful website with 19 million visits a year.

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