The traditional ad game often uses distractions and humor to foster awareness of a product’s particular benefits. When casting a wide net for eyeballs, this approach has worked out for many brands.

But the online game needs to be played a bit differently. If you’re creating great content, there’s no point in trying to trick people into consuming it. Distraction is one type of attention, while engagement is quite another.

Are you ready for some nutritional info?

Good Food Fight is a bad microsite

The Good Food Fight is a General Mills microsite that attempts to lead you to consume nutritional content by inviting you to throw virtual food at characters who taunt you. It’s like an online dunk-tank or food-fight video game. You pick a character to throw at and the food you want to throw. Then the characters walk around the screen, you grab food from around the screen, and you try to hit them.

It’s a terrible idea with an even worse execution. The first problem is that it doesn’t function very well. It appears to be about two years old, so perhaps the technology hasn’t aged well. But that is one of the perils of investing in a technology-driven site like this — short shelf life. A box of Cheerios stays fresh longer.

Bad content doesn’t work

I looked on compete.com, and the traffic for the microsite is very low, and the engagement appears to be abysmal. Except for some spikes up to 4,000 and 7,000, less than a thousand people click through to the site each month and they stay for an average of 15 seconds. Clearly that’s not enough time to even selecting to throw your spaghetti and meatballs at Ruthless Ruth the lunch lady.

The Good Food Fight is connected to another, larger General Mills microsite called Eat Better America. The game is actually played on an Eat Better America page. The strategy appears to be:

1. Get you to play the stupid game.
2. Get you to think about food.
3. Make you curious about nutrition.
4. Drive you to Eat Better America.

Good content does work

Eat Better America is actually full of engaging and helpful content. It is a very well-executed microsite. It has very helpful information from General Mills’ nutritionists and other sources, and it offers a well-attended forum and even coupons as well.

According to Compete.com, Eat Better America also has a steady audience of between 500K and 1M visitors — with extended spikes up to 2M. Average stay looks to be around 2 min 30 sec. This is a much larger and more engaged audience than for The Good Food Fight.

Don’t condescend to your audience

It seems that General Mills may not have trusted all consumers to understand the need to be healthier. So they thought they could trick consumers interested in playing a silly video game into being interested in nutrition? These are vastly different goals and audiences.

Gimmicks like this just don’t work online. Maybe it works to have a back-of-the-cereal-box game with urls to nutrition. But online, anyone who’s seeking mindless entertainment can find much better and more savvy options.

Don’t waste your time and resources

The paradigm should be to target people who have a genuine interest in the content, engage them with quality content, and keep them engaged through the forums and regularlay updated content. Don’t worry about roping in more eyeballs. Worry about providing useful information to very interested people. Everyone else can find their own foodfight.