This college fest, be the Campus Gaming Star

Intel announces Intel Core 2 Quad Campus Gaming Star in association with Lenovo

What happens when a top processor developer and a notebook maker come together, powered by a gaming portal, for the college festival season? An entertainment and gaming bonanza.

That is what ZapakLive, the activation cell of Zapak.com, started out to create when contacted by Intel to develop a platform to engage “fest-hoppers” in what modern computing technology has to offer.

Keeping this in mind, Intel and Lenovo launched Intel Core 2 Quad Campus Gaming Star during Rendezvous 2008, the cultural fest of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. They now plan to take the event to 29 other colleges across India.

This college fest, be the Campus Gaming Star

Digital DJ'ing workshop

Participants at the Campus Gaming Star

Roshni Das, manager, consumer marketing, Intel, tells afaqs!, “We wanted to create a certain relevance in the minds of the youth and to tell them what PCs can do. Therefore the core theme of the campaign is gaming and Intel and Lenovo want to give their target audience an experience of the kind of high-end performance PCs today can offer.”

The Campus Gaming Star event at IIT had a 30 seater gaming rig, where some hardcore and casual gaming titles were played. To deliver on the 'Experience beyond Gaming' promise, Intel and Lenovo had workshops around laptop DJ'ing and digital art conducted by DJ Soul and Rita Amin, respectively.

Lenovo has, in the past, done various activation campaigns, believing as it does in touch and feel marketing. According to its general manager, marketing, Prasanna Rai, it is making optimum use of the campus initiative to promote its two products, Wifi10, an entertainment feature, and Lenovo IdeaPadY710, a gaming machine.

Rai tells afaqs!, “Lenovo has been engaged in various activation programmes to target its consumers, who are basically college students and young professionals. Since Indian consumers go by the touch and feel of products, Campus Gaming Star has given us one more platform to deliver on that.”

ZapakLive is in charge of the entire execution of the campaign, which will last through the college festival season – from October to January. The format of the event will be uniform for all colleges.

Arun Mehra

Arun Mehra, chief marketing officer, Zapak Digital Entertainment, says, “Providing a platform to Campus Gaming Star was a natural step for us, as gaming and competition per se are a natural fit for Zapak. We have the ground presence, knowledge presence and credibility to keep the excitement going.”

When asked whether the campaign will depend on the pull of the college festivals to get the required audience or whether any pre-event promotions were planned, Das tells afaqs! that the IIT fest saw three tier promotions to kickstart the event – online, traditional and viral.

“Since gaming is basically an online mechanism, we put up banners on Youth.intel.com and Zapak.com, apart from engaging college communities. Catching the excitement of the college community at IIT helped us set up a system of viral marketing, which acted as a great pull.”

The next stop for the campaign is the fest at Thakur College of Engineering, Mumbai, October 10-12.

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