Integrated marketing

July 6, 2006 on 4:25 pm | In Advergames, Brands |

Every day, advergaming moves further up the food chain, and we take our briefs earlier and earlier in the planning process. This is a good thing, as it dramatically increases our effectiveness.

However, sometimes we still take our brief very late in the process, when the marketing campaign is almost ready to roll. As a result, we miss out on opportunities to integrate the game into the entire marketing strategy, and we may even miss out on the chance to achieve sign-off on the game concept itself.

Late briefings happen for a number of reasons. Maybe no one has considered how games can support and feed off the other elements of the campaign with well thought-out integration. Maybe they’re thinking “this campaign is almost ready to roll, better add a game to make it complete”. Sometimes it’s a scenario like “Oh look, we’ve just realised the World Cup is next month, can you come up with some World Cup related brilliant idea that we can strap on to our campaign?” Or it’s “we’ve got some money left over, so let’s do a game”.

Whether, the strategy is in place and they just want us to embellish it or there is no strategy at all, coming in late is a problem. Of course we still do our best in these situations; we always want to be proud of our work. But it’s better to be involved much earlier.

For a start, if you come in late you may not have time to get buy-in from all the decision makers. Often we’re approached by just one member of the team — from the agency or the client — and until several other people are on-board with the idea, it simply can’t go ahead. It takes time to build relationships and that can be where the process comes undone.

The other concern is how effectively the game can be integrated into the marketing strategy if the briefing occurs too late. If you want to see how an integrated campaign works, check out our work for Crusha, where we tied the game in with SMS, TV, online and the in-store experience. This level of integration — and these results — are only possible if you get in early.