Creativity pays off, as the Minneapolis agency Mono has discovered with its second Webby nomination in two years.  Mono is one of three Twin Cities-based Web creators up for the Internet’s version of the Oscar this year. You have a few more weeks to vote for them — and dozens of other nominees from around the world – in the 2008 Webby Awards

Last year, Mono got a nod for its clever Monoface interactive time-waster. This year, it’s up for  The Good Food Fight, a website it created for General Mills that turns typically dry information about healthy eating into a fun game that blows out the boundaries of what users expect from such a site. 

“General Mills approached us with an interest in doing something different, and in fact, went outside their usual roster of agencies to hire us,” Mono partner Jim Scott explained. “We found a willing partner in Doug Moore, VP of Advertising for Big G at General Mills, who recognized the importance of engaging people on the Web in a way that was unconventional for health-related sites. For us, we came to a simple conclusion. There’s no shortage of information. There’s just a shortage of interesting ways to deliver it. And the simple idea of a food fight (albeit a healthy one) grew out of that conclusion.”

At the site, you begin by picking a healthy dish and an on-screen virtual opponent. Then you can start throwing food around the site using the fruits, vegetables and other food items in images from the recipes and articles. When you get hit by food, it splats against your screen and drips down. Your opponent climbs atop the text boxes and other website furniture to get a better shot at you or to hide. It’s wild fun.

“The Good Food Fight has remained a successful ’side door’ into eatbetteramerica.com and has helped that site register nearly 2 million
members to date,” Scott said.

You can vote for The Good Food Fight and the other Twin Cities nominees — Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain video and Jesse Vig’s geoGreeting – as well as dozens of other nominees, through May 1 at the Webby Awards ballot site. Winners will be announced May 6.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.