In my first few months working at Warner Bros we were told to start thinking of ideas to promote the forthcoming Wombats record. Alex Burford and I went for a brainstorming beer and came up with some great plans long before the album had a name or any of the lead singles were even written.

At the time I was fascinated by sites like the geocitiesizer and Kanyelicious. I thought it would be amazing if you could hijack a website and Wombatize it. So the plan to build a much more advanced tool was set in motion.

With a few weeks to go before the release of This Modern Glitch, I’m proud to launch The Wombatizer. Entering any url into The Wombatizer will give you a uniquely glitched version of that website. A lot of the images, banners and flash content on the page will be replaced by Wombats photos and an images of people holding a piece of paper that says ‘click here’ – this launches a pop-up window that plays a video, shows some photos or allows you to enter exclusive competitions. Closer to the album release date the Wombatizer will be the first place to hear samples of the album.

I needed a very talented team to build The Wombatizer, so I enlisted Laurien Gloeg at Metropolis to bring it to life. Phil Allen and Jason Fidler worked tirelessly on the project to get it ready for launch. The most challenging task was the extensive testing and debugging necessary to make The Wombatizer do a good job on as many sites as possible.

I wanted to make sure the Wombatizer was of an award-winning standard so to save time I got involved in generating some assets myself. I designed and developed a number of the competition entry forms as well as generating unique looking ‘click here’ images from the album artwork.

I edited the landing page to include addthis sharing buttons, pre-order links to buy the album, optimised meta tags for social sharing and a translated page for german fans.

The Wombatizer launched with a massive competition in partnership with Shazam. By wombatizing a site you can find a form that includes an mp3 player. If you Shazam the song you’ll get a promo code that can be used to enter the competition. One lucky winner will win two tickets to see The Wombats live in Barcelona. Other competitions prizes include tickets to the London album launch party and Wombats T-Shirts. You can also find exclusive videos, all the recent music videos and a free download.

The following links demonstrate the Wombatizer at it’s best:
nativenoise.co.za
nativenoise.co.za/all-posts
myspace.com
nme.com
YouTube.com
guardian.co.uk

Click here to Wombatize this page

Try Wombatizing any other urls at: wombatizer.com