iHobo is a game that takes place in real-time over 3 days. You are given a homeless man to live on your phone for 72 hours. In that time you have to be there to provide him with every need, whether it be food, money or a sleeping bag. If you're not there for him then he can turn to drugs, or even die. Annoyingly, I didn't request push notifications on this, so when my homeless man wanted something I wasn't there for him. Basically, when I checked up on him by the morning he had been mugged for his sleeping bag, didn't have any money for a hostel and had taken drugs to stop the cold. Clearly I'm not cut out for this malarkey.
The app was created by Publicis London to raise awareness of Depaul UK, a charity devoted to youth homelessness, with the aim of trying to get more young people involved in the issue. I found it to be effective in the way that it instills a sense of guilt in you when you come back to find out what's been happening with your hobo after leaving him for the night - putting the issue into an almost entertaining setting helps the user to understand what can happen when homeless, and hopefully will encourage others to think twice when they pass a real homeless person on the street.
The idea behind the campaign is that the star of the films, Rosa, who has over 800 friends on Facebook, has to go and visit each one separately, no matter where they are in the world, and see whether or not they are actually her friends. Meetings include the person she’s never met, the one who got away and an old school friend.
What I think most of us can relate to is that even she has a number of ‘friends’ on Facebook who she’s only briefly met, or hasn’t spoken to for a long time. I often find myself looking through my friends and wondering who people are…. maybe the campaign is encouraging us to cut our friends lists down?!
I think in itself it’s a brilliant concept, although I’m not too sure how it would encourage me to buy the phone, especially when the majority of all phones now support social networking apps. I don’t think I’ll be changing my iPhone anytime soon.
In fact now I’ve researched further into this since I saw it a couple of months ago it turns out that Microsoft have axed their Kin phone. Even a good advertising campaign can't sell an average product.
