Guest article: Project “Main Jackpot and Bezeq in Minecraft”

Hi friends, here is Mr. Shibolet, one of the founders of the Parliamentum Productions Group (together with 2BOFand Stinger). We are the producing team of the project “Main JackPot and Bezeq in Minecraft”, which was highly appreciated and won gold in the Granot Prize and the Booster of the Israeli Marketing Association.

In a world where everything is constantly changing, it is known that new marketing methods are gaining momentum.

Shiran Butbul of Dani Levy Communications developed an innovative marketing gimmick for Bezeq’s Fibercraft campaign, whose public relations was managed by their firm. They initiated filming an episode of “Main Jackpot in Minecraft”.
Shiran knew that gamers are a community that develops from year to year, and more and more, we see gamification-based advertising platforms addressing this audience on their home turf.

Shiran knew Parliamentum Productions specialize in creating various and varied gaming content, whether in-game, live productions, or even duplicating in-game structures and building infrastructure (just like this case), and he called us.

The Brief: Bezeq celebrates reaching one million households in Israel

The challenge: A revolutionary move for Bezeq that will make it perceived as a market leader in the Internet in general and gaming in particular and will shake up the network.

The cracking: Bezeq + Main Jackpot on Minecraft!

Some general info: Minecraft is the largest and most widely used metaverse and gaming platform! This is due to their flexibility to adapt and create (almost) everything in it! The game has over 238 million copies sold (not including the separate Chinese market with about 400 million copies).

Sources claim that the audience is around 180 million monthly players, and in Israel – there is an estimated over 700,000 players (representing 40% of all players) of Minecraft (Source: Statista).

The move: We built for Dani Levy Communications, in collaboration with the advertising agency Adler Chomsky, a virtual city called “Fiber City,” where a super-satisfying game awaited: “connecting as many households as possible to flash fiber.”

Participants had to walk around the city to obtain fiber and interact with characters from the popular series Main Jackpot, who provide the fiber. Within the city, buildings from reality were reconstructed into the game, such as the famous writer’s building from the series “Shefa Issachar” and Anatoli’s villa, and were located within the hand-built city, and next to each house waited for a fiber whose goal was to connect the player in order to win points.

The move was driven by a dedicated “mini-episode” video within Minecraft, in which we took the characters, modeled an in-game letter based on blocks, and filmed an episode within the game engine (and an external engine), using direct dubbing of the original players from the series. The episode included jokes from the content world of Minecraft, a teaser for the city, and a call to action leading to the landing page that presented awards and drew curiosity and motivated actors.

In terms of the production side of the project, it was managed by the Parliamentum Productions team, composed of the greatest gamers in Israel in the field of Minecraft: Mr. Shibolet, Stinger, and 2Bof, together with technical staff, who dismantled the macro characterization in the resulting brief, and developed the game experience from the conceptual level, to the level of a finished game, under a clear infrastructure, goals and prizes.

The construction process included a three-dimensional scanning stage of a building in reality and its reconstruction within the game engine by a professional team of builders. It included preliminary planning, construction of a skeleton for the construction map, and then general construction and completion of details. Step by step, we built the different map areas while, at the same time, a Java programmer in the Spigot API library worked on the technical side. After the construction and development were carried out – a server developer took the map and connected the software Between them into one virtual space that would be open to everyone. This stage is the ping pong and accuracy phase on our part, with the Danny Levy Communications team, Adler Chomsky, and the client (Bezeq), where every construction stage has an update and repairs on the fly.

The campaigns significantly exceeded all KPIs, generated millions of online views in a single weekend, and resulted in about 370 days of gameplay (over a year!) by players from all over the country during the two weeks that the server was open!