Our place in the sun

June 6, 2006 on 9:06 pm | In Advergames |

Those of us who create advergames for a living face a huge challenge — putting ourselves on the radar within the wider advertising and marketing industry, especially with some of the larger companies. And a big part of this comes down to how we measure return on investment (ROI).

To pull apart ROI, let’s look at the return, then the investment.

The R in ROI

When it comes to the return, there’s little recognition by most marketers today of anything that advergames can offer beyond direct response — play, laugh, click-through, buy. Branding can be a key reason for creating an advergame, but it’s not included in how marketers are evaluating them.

Games sit in a strange area because they sort of do everything from branding to direct response; they try to be all things to all marketers. We’re almost trying to wear too many hats at once. That causes one of the biggest challenges for us, as it means we must gain credibility with all the different camps that own these territories — lead generation, brand management, etc.

The I in ROI

When it comes to the investment, it helps to compare our situation to TV advertising. When someone calculates the ROI of a TVC, they never include the production budget as part of the cost, even though it can be millions and millions of dollars. The cost they track is the biggest cost — the media spend required to reach those eyeballs.

But for a game, production is the biggest expense. Although seeding a game is increasingly a large part of the spend, the actual production cost is basically where it starts and ends. And in the advergaming industry, we’re factoring production costs into our ROI.

I’m immersed in the agency culture in London, and it’s clear to me that there are many things we need to shake out of that tree before advergaming can really become established. For a start, we need to align some of the basic comparisons, so R always means R and I always means I — whether we’re talking about TVCs or advergaming or direct mail. But realistically, we’re not really at the stage to make those comparisons yet. Our industry is still in an embryonic stage.