Chrysler.com - an Alexa rank of 9,000?

September 29, 2006 on 4:56 pm | In Advergames, Brands |

How can this be? Chrysler.com has an Alexa rank of 9,000. For an online brochure? Surely this is a spike caused by a runaway piece of viral content?

But no - a small amount of casual Googling reveals that Chrysler have been using branded games with huge success for over 2 years now. As a consequence of this partnership with Wild Tangent, they have found that online activity has had an increasing influence on the whole selling chain:

Chrysler is using a variety of custom branded games involving their products to lift its brand recognition and purchase intent among consumers. A “Chrysler Golf” title signed up 124,732 players and resulted in a 33% lift in purchase intent, while a “Jeep 4×4 Trail of Life” game got 383,403 users …and more than 1,000 Jeeps had been sold to players of the game in the last 18 months.

Recognising that I might be the last person in the games industry (or on the planet) to have spotted Chrysler’s investment in advergaming I still can’t believe this has been going on for so long; as our feeling is that it’s only this year that ad agencies and brands are accepting games as part of the language of marketing so that that they’re discussed as known feature of the landscape rather than ‘unknown territory’.

What I particularly like about what they have done is the ‘if we build it they will come’ approach. These may have been created as one-off promotional games but there is ongoing value in aggregating all the content to give their target audience exactly what they would have gone elsewhere for. Which means that once more I can post a link to this: It’s time to experiment 3.