Earlier this week I sent a mail out heralding the launch of Monopoly City Streets (http://www.monopolycitystreets.com/): a joint undertaking between Google and Hasbro to create a global interactive version of Monopoly. Now given that Google has a monopoly of the search market with nigh on 80% of all searches going through it, and that Monopoly is a pretty popular game (reputed to be “the most played (commercial) game in the world”, having entertained over 750 million people since it came to the fore in the early 1930s), you would think that the powers that be would have planned for a lot of activity. Or a lot of interest. So it was disappointing to note that as soon as the game went live, the severs crashed, as the systems could not come with the amount of traffic visiting the site, and the game is still suffering issues as I write.
The team’s excuse was (according to the Monopoly City Streets blog (http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com/)) that despite having “planned for a lot of traffic on launch day and load testing the game …for a whole month” the team simply hadn’t “accounted for the enthusiasm of Monopoly fans around the world, everyone who was excited to try out the new experience and non-stop mentions of the game on Twitter, blogs and everywhere else”. In other words they hadn’t planned properly.
So here’s the question. Who is responsible for this mess? Is it the agency’s fault for not having planned thoroughly enough or the clients for not investing enough? Or is it simply one of those things? It’s an interesting quandary. The client would have had a limited budget for this activity, so the agency and the client would have had to make certain assumptions, amongst which was the amount that should be spent on servers and bandwidth. Despite the popularity of the game, you never know how popular something is going to be until it is actually live. So the team underspent and waited to see what happened. In this case, the team were apparently out by approximately a factor of three. That is a pretty epic fail, IMHO.
It’s not like there are a lack of precedents for an upsurge in activity during launch day. When the Nectar programme was launched back in early noughties, the Nectar team made a similar mistake to universal criticism; more recently when the 1851 census was made available online the servers crashed and it took the team more than two weeks to get things back on track. But. And it’s a big but. Just because this has happened before, doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen every time. And that’s one of the challenge of being in Client Services – determining the risk factor of campaigns and elements of campaigns. And managing the fall out when things go wrong.
And again that brings us to the real point here. Despite the issues, was there any actual damage to any of the brands involved, or is this just another example of a social media storm that allocates a much higher level of seriousness to an issue than there actually is? The users were being given something for free that was just a bit of fun, so did they have any right to be annoyed if they have to wait before it works properly? In such cases, common sense usually prevails.
So it is intriguing to note that in an equally interesting case that Helen came across when surfing (http://blogs.bnet.com/customer-service/?p=241&tag=nl.e713), it appears that the team at IKEA went to the other extreme when planning for a new activity (a brochure relaunch) – they worried too much. In the IKEA case, the issue was centred around the level of animosity that might result if IKEA switched their catalogue font from a bespoke (expensive) version to Verdana (a much cheaper, more accessible version). The creative team were up in arms, the client was terrified and the Twitterati and blogsphere created a lot of noise. But despite all the fuss, and all the noise, it turned out that IKEAs core customers didn’t actually care.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, or how much you worry, you just can’t get it right.