NabiscoWorld

» see nabiscoworld.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

NabiscoWorld had no way to make money and was never supposed to. It sold nothing and it ran no advertising on itself, because it was the advertising. A biscuit company paid a game studio to build several dozen free browser games, put them on a site with a cookie in the middle of the logo, and gave them away to anyone with a modem. The revenue arrived later, at a supermarket, in a form nobody was measuring.

It opened in 1999 and the studio behind it was Skyworks Technologies, run by Garry Kitchen and David Crane, two men who had written Atari 2600 games at Activision before the crash. They had already done this once, building Candystand for Life Savers in 1997. NabiscoWorld was the second contract on the same template and it went further: not one brand with games attached, but a whole portfolio arranged as a virtual amusement park, with sweepstakes.

By 2004 it was carrying games for seventeen separate brands. Oreo, Chips Ahoy, whatever else Nabisco was selling that year, each got a game and a corner of the park. The site's own defense was that adults were about sixty percent of its 2005 traffic, which is a strange number to volunteer in your own defense when the argument against you is that children are the other forty.

Most of the brands on it were not on a shelf i could reach. Turkish supermarkets in the early 2000s carried Ulker and Eti, and american biscuit names were an import-aisle curiosity if they were there at all. So the site worked on me the way it worked on most of the non-american internet: through aggregators. Those games were lifted and rehosted on free game portals with the branding still baked into the artwork, and you played a level made of a cookie you had never eaten.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

Advergaming had a genuinely clever argument behind it, which is why so much money went into it. A television spot buys thirty seconds of half-attention. A browser game that is actually fun buys twenty minutes of full attention, and the player chose to be there, and will come back tomorrow without being paid to. If you can hold someone's eyes for twenty minutes with your logo in the corner, the math beats broadcast by a wide margin.

The other half of the pitch was cost. Flash games were cheap next to a national ad campaign and they never expired. A game built in 2001 was still sitting on the server in 2008 doing the same job for free. For a decade that looked like the most efficient marketing spend available, and every large consumer brand in america ended up with a games portal because of it.

~ what people objected to ~

The objection was never that the games were bad. It was that a child playing one cannot tell it is an advertisement, because there is no break and nothing on screen that marks where the entertainment stops. The Center for Science in the Public Interest went after the whole category in the mid-2000s, and its nutrition director's line about these sites was blunt: almost without exception the food being advertised through them was of poor nutritional quality.

That criticism landed during the years when childhood obesity became a political subject in the United States, and food companies started signing self-regulatory pledges about marketing to children under twelve. NabiscoWorld kept running through all of it. The pledges were about what you could advertise, and a free game about a cookie occupied a definitional gap nobody had written rules for yet.

~ the postmortem ~

It did not die of the criticism and it did not die of Flash. It died of a corporate reorganization. On 1 october 2012 Kraft Foods split itself into two listed companies, Mondelez International taking the global snack brands and Kraft Foods Group keeping the north american grocery business. Nabisco went with Mondelez, and somewhere in the paperwork of dividing one company into two, a games site with fourteen years of content in it became nobody's responsibility.

At the end of 2012 a notice went up saying that due to changes the games had been removed. In early 2013 Snackworks took over the address as a recipe and brand site, and it carried almost none of the games with it. The Flash files survived only because people went and pulled them out of the Wayback Machine afterward, title by title, into spreadsheets and emulator collections. Today nabiscoworld.com is a redirect to the Mondelez corporate site, which is the least playful destination the address could possibly have ended up at.

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