The Hated Sheep Booths

Sullivan Higdon & Sink (now known as Signal Theory) built its whole point of view around one idea: sheep are what happens to marketing that follows instead of leads. One place where their brand was most evident was their trade booths at the National Association of Agricultural Marketing (NAMA). I worked on two of them, in 2011 and 2012, and both were interactive experiences that let attendees play with the brand.

In 2011, we created a social game called The Hated Sheep Project. Attendees tweeted unkind things at @hatedsheep with the #11AMC hashtag, and a projected screen ran the tweet stream, a leaderboard, and a progress arrow that every tweet pushed toward an unlockable event or bit of swag at the booth. The more tweets, the faster the arrow moved, and the more likely attendees were to get a prize.

I designed and built the app that was on screen in the booth, and I even created a mobile web app that allowed us to moderate the tweets and control the progress arrow from a phone.

The final unlock was access to a party at the end of the conference, and participants in the game were sent invites via Twitter. The party was a hit, and the game was a fun way to explore social gaming in real time.

In 2012 the sheep came back as zombies.

An Xbox Kinect controller watched the player as they grabbed a toy battle axe or Hulk fists to fight off a never-ending horde of zombie sheep. As they played, the Kinect took pictures of them in action. If their score was high enough, their photo was added to the high score wall of fame.

Bazillion Pictures built the Unity game and the agency’s designers did the booth. I wrote the app that pulled each player’s photo off the Kinect mid-game and pushed it with their score to the leaderboard screen. The big red button that started a round was an Arduino I built to signal the PC running the game.

Once it was all running smoothly, I shot a quick video to document the experience.