Desperados Throws a YouTube Party If You’re of Drinking Age

Desperados is a tequila flavored beer (Hey, at least it doesn’t have milk) produced by the Fischer Brewery in Schiltigheim, France and traditionally marketed towards the Germans living across the border 9 kilometers away. The France-based creative ad agency Dufresne Corrigan Scarlett and digital production house MediaMonks want to change that last part.

Fisher hired the two companies for an interactive YouTube takeover campaign targeting drinkers worldwide. The Desperados Experience asks for your age, country, and the sex you want to party with before determining if you’re old enough to drink. If you’re of age, the doors open and a video begins that eventually reaches out to touch the YouTube player and takes over the entire page.

It’s kinda cool! It’s also kinda getting old! We’ve seen this type of advertising tactic a bunch of times before (from Nintendo, Samsung, The Expendables, and Tipp-Ex). What started off as a fantastic, jarring way to get consumers’ attention and admiration is now fast becoming played out.

The Desperados Experience, however, does incorporate a few extra elements that keeps it clever. Viewers can opt to let Desperados access your Facebook account, which it will then mine for pictures to strategically place throughout the video. There’s also a mini-gaming portion. At one point in the ad, Desperados tells viewers to drag the video slider to break down a wall to gain access to a party that looks like the Big Boi concert at Austin’s Seaholm Power Plant

That interactive component is the best part of the video and where these types of YouTube takeovers – and YouTube interactivity in general – have the most room to grow.

At Tubefilter’s SXSW Panel on Interactive YouTube Storytellers, Rafi Fine told the audience his dream scenario for YouTube interactivity was a kind of annotation tool that offered the viewer opportunities to interact beyond binary A or B choices. It seems the technology already exists, at least for brands paying hefty sums to YouTube for customized campaigns. It’ll be cool when we’re able to watch more brands, The Fine Bros., and the YouTube masses take that technology into unexplored territories.