Advergaming grows up

July 7, 2006 on 9:26 pm | In Advergames, Brands |

In the earliest days of our industry, most advergames were fairly clunky rebadges of existing games. So you’d create a basic game for one product, then someone would come along and say we want our True Blu Cola™ in there instead, and we’d plaster their logo all over it and charge them a fee.

That was well and good, but there was no real conversation about what the objectives might be other than having a game that sported their brand. It was very much a “me too” thing. Marketers reasoned that games were cool, sticky content, and decided to involve some of their brands. And why not?
Luckily, the market is now much more mature. You’ve still got jokers who are willing to take anyone’s money and run, but most advergames developers now have a much more sophisticated approach to creating what’s effectively an online advertising solution.

They’ll now invest in a proper briefing process in which they try to establish what the objectives are for the campaign, what the assets are, and how you can measure the game’s return.

Why has this happened? Simple: marketers are seeing the benefits of developing bespoke content for their campaign, even if it costs a little more than rebranding someone else’s content.

If someone still wants a rebadged game and their objective is simply to have a game, then that’s fine, because the rebadged game has met an objective (even if it hasn’t helped their business).

But there is a lot more you can do with games, and people are starting to realise their potential and be more ambitious.

I’m not saying these games must be created from scratch. After all, there’s no such thing as an original, creative idea. Everything takes influences from other parts of life. We reuse game engines, we reuse bits of code, we reuse promotional ideas.

The point is not that games must be created from scratch, but that every solution we offer must fit with what our client is trying to achieve. It must be created on that basis, rather than just because we’ve got an engine that’s lying dormant and we want to use it for another game.