The Good, The Bad, and the Transgender of the Simpsons Movie / Burger King viral campaign.

I have been a Simpsons fan for the majority of my life. I have seen nearly every episode and have bought every season on DVD the day each is released. So you can imagine how excited I was when the news came out that there would FINALLY be a Simpson movie. I watched every clip and trailer I could get my hands on and eagerly awaited the elaborate ad campaign and tie-ins that would surely usher in such an event.

One of those tie-ins was with the online viral darling, Burger King, in the form of simpsonizeme.com. I learned of this site through the television element of the campaign. The action in the ad starts in a real world environment. Suddenly, the aliens seen in every Simpson Halloween special appear and start to zap live action people into 2-D Simpson characters. In the end, it turns out the Burger King himself is behind all these extraterrestrial shenanigans. The viewer is then invited to go to simpsonizeme.com to be turned into a Simpsons character.

Here’s how it works. You upload a photo of yourself and give the Simpsonizer some details on your gender, age, style, etc. After some load wait time, you are presented with a base character that is supposed to resemble your photo. You can then manually embellish and customize the 2-D you with everything from hairstyles to clothing.

The Good…
This concept is fantastic. What die-hard Simpson fan hasn’t wondered what he or she would look like in two dimensions with yellow skin and a severe overbite? I haven’t been able to dig up any results on traffic to the site, but if my immediate visit after the first viewing of the TV ad is any indication, that traffic must be fairly heavy.

The Bad…
Because of the commercial involving the aliens, scenes from the previews lead me to believe that this would be a Simpsons version of Independence Day. However, when I saw the movie on opening weekend, the plot was not at all what I had anticipated. The movie was still very funny and enjoyable, but it seemed to lack the scale and excitement that the Burger King commercial had seemed to portray.

The other bad part of this is that you are asked to use a very specific photo format to make the Simpsonizer work properly. This could cause a user to decide to “come back later” when they have a good photo, which usually translates to “come back never.”

The Transgender …
During my visit to simpsonizeme.com I learned something very interesting. I am a woman in Springfield. Yep, the two times I uploaded a photo to the Simpsonizer, an obvious depiction of a female was the result, DESPITE the fact that I marked “DUDE” in the gender section. And even though I could make the manual adjustments, all the options were for a female character. Plus, there was no way to eliminate the lipstick my character wore without starting over.

Again, I will say that this is a great concept (WOOHOO!). There is just a major flaw in execution (D’OH!). Personally, I would have avoided the photo upload altogether and made the whole process manual, similar to developing a Mii character for the Nintendo Wii. If I could have built my Simpsonized character from the ground up, I would have had a lot more fun, spent more time on the site and been much more likely to show the 2-D me to everyone I know…all the ingredients for a delicious viral campaign (mmmmmmmmmm…viral).

An interesting side note to this post…I had planned on posting this in early August, but never got to it. I’m glad I didn’t, because since then I have seen that many people have had great success in creating their Simpson character and have actually been using the end product as their avatars in social networks such as twitter and flickr. That doesn’t change that fact that I would have made the whole process manual, but it does make me wonder what I was doing wrong…or am I really a Simpson woman trapped in a man’s body?