Hotel 626

Why it works

To bring two discontinued flavours back for Halloween 2008, Doritos and Goodby Silverstein & Partners built a haunted hotel that existed only online and only opened between 6pm and 6am. Produced with B-Reel, Hotel 626 trapped visitors in a first-person nightmare across 13 rooms, to be played alone in the dark with headphones: it made you sing a demon baby to sleep through your microphone, secretly took your picture with your webcam and showed it back to you later in a madman's lair, then rang your actual mobile phone to talk you out. It is studied as a landmark of immersive web craft that turned the visitor's own devices into horror props, and, critically, by consumer advocates as an example of intense digital marketing aimed at teenagers. More than four million people in 136 countries were reported to have visited, and the revived flavours sold out. At Cannes in 2009 it won a Gold Cyber Lion, and it took a One Show Gold Pencil.