Weiden+Kennedy, the ad agency best known for its 20-year relationship with Nike, recently made waves through big ad agencies when Nike parted ways with them to seek an agency with more prowess in digital media. Now, under the direction of Joakim Borgstrom, hired to the newly created role

of Interactive Creative Director, W+K Amsterdam have launched a rebuttal against Nike’s vote of no-confidence in their interactive media skills: Kahrashin.com, an online campaign promoting AE’s violence-embracing game Burnout Dominator. Kahrashin actually refers to a Tibetan principle of “inner peace through outer violence”—in other words, relax by playing a video game where you get to crash cars and make things blow up.

The Kahrashin site is an interactive experience that plays out at its own pace, to the point where you might wonder if it’s practicing a different Tibetan philosophy, say, silent meditation? It makes the user wait and wonder a bit and forces him to time his clicks, something of a nod to a gaming experience, but the eventual payoff lets the user engage in some inner peace through outer violence, such as the chance to upload their screams to a “scream gallery” and view the screams of others. This community of screaming faces brings a nice touch of “realness” to an otherwise almost implacably slick and prohibitively slow site.

They also go for the viral angle with a “scream to a friend” function that I think people would probably use if they had already uploaded their own scream to the mix. However, the site loses points for the creepy/spammy text of the email you receive when someone shares the site with you. The subject of the email that goes out is "Friend Fun,” and then the body says simply:
“A friend has posted this video for you from KahRaShin.com. Click here to watch and see Kah Ra Shin in action.” This may be intentionally cryptic to match the mood of the site, but I’d probably assume this was spam and delete it. As a designer, it’s worth considering the complete user experience in light of our current spam-saturated times. Overall, the site asserts W+K’s growing body of interactive work and is producing some buzz in the blogosphere. But what do you think of its cryptic style and slow pace? As a consumer-oriented site, do you dig this, or does it make you want to smash your computer for some inner peace?