Integrated marketing

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.

quick links 6-July-06

http://www.nudisttrampolining.com/ - an eye-wateringly worrying concept to promote the movie, Confetti.
http://www.kaizenracinggame.co.uk/ - Hmm. It’s the pits (where I got stuck). :-S

quick links 30-June-06

More fussball from Skol this time.
A great little game for sticky.tv
…and a great little game just for the fun of it.

quick links 28-June-06

Specsavers Keepy Uppy game - enough football games yet?
Article on Adotas discusses some interesting research about which demographics prefer which game types.
Game for Gradjobs.co.uk

Act Like a Man - drink beer

You’re a beer brand, so you need to connect with your audience through either common areas of interest (football), event-based content experiences (live music) or aspirational advertising. Right?

Not if you’re Milwaukee’s Best Light. Just create some simple, well produced, funny and original advergames that appeal to the average Joe. They left me grinning and more than a little thirsty. Can you get this stuff in London?

quick links 23-June-06

http://quiz.hildebrand.co.uk/index.html - England Tourist Board quiz
http://injurytime.skive.co.uk/ - game for megastar.co.uk
http://www.keepthemuppy.com/ - mad Virgin Money game
http://www.time-to-shine.com/tts/ - ???

quick links 22-June-06

http://www.samsung.com/se/current/campaign/d600/index_en.htm - there’s a game in there somewhere.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/?p=268 - interesting lineage of match 3 games from the Ludologist.
http://www.actonimpulse.com/game/index.html - game for Impulse.

quick links 19-June-06

http://absolut.com/ - find the bottles; exquisite.
http://www.pumafootball.com/buffon.jsp - Beat the ‘keeper. Nice video, lousy game.
http://www.growingforlife.org/game/ - this one grew on me.

Use a specialist

Have a look at this advergame for PJ Smoothies. It’s a well produced and thought out promotion - except for one thing - the game is a shocker. It’s such a frustrating experience that it undoes all the other good work that’s gone into it. Advergames do nothing until they engage the user - once you have their attention, a dialogue can begin and many things become possible. But a weak game undermines the whole package.

My advice? Use a specialist. Yes, this is more than just a game, but without a game that get’s my attention at its heart, it’s doing more harm than good.

Child labour

My kids love testing the advergames we create.

We often found ourselves going into client meetings and telling them what kids love — like we’d have any idea! We’ll say things like “they love physical comedy”, and of course we know this is true. But then we’ll create something and show it to the kids and they’ll go “What is this, it’s stupid!” Or there’s a part of it they’ll think is really cool and you’ll go “Really? That?”

I showed them our Wolf N Swine game, which tells the story of the three little pigs — except it’s the pig’s revenge. Sick of having his house blown down, he gets hold of the wolf and whacks him.
In our first version of this game, there was a nice little story at the beginning that sets it up, and a pig who came out and told the wolf not to mess with him. We thought that was really funny but the kids said “why have you got that in there? It’s not funny. I just want to play the game.” Possibly they were right — it didn’t need a story. It was like having two sets of instructions.
It would be really nice if they said a lot of “that’s cool” when we weren’t expecting it, but it doesn’t happen as often. But whether they’re giving us unexpected criticism or praise, they’re a great sounding board. As long as I can get them to pay attention for long enough. That’s the problem with kids these days…

Real objectives

I know I’ve mentioned the AT&T campaign before, but it’s worth discussing again with regard to the whole issue of strategic thinking in advergames design.

Achieving 87,000 hours of brand exposure — as claimed for the AT&T game — is a process goal. It’s a means to an end. It’s not an end in itself.

Strategic thinkers in marketing want to track the relationship between process goals and marketing outcomes, such as measurable increases in awareness, consideration and purchase. The advergaming industry needs to get smarter if we want to shift games from the “nice to have” basket to “must have.”

Branding is increasingly something you can offer as a metric with games and other online content. There are opportunities to deliver accountable solutions, whether you measure new leads or increases in brand awareness. When we’re accountable, we’ll have the respect of marketers.

Our place in the sun

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.

Football Fever - new Dell game

There must be a World Cup coming up or something. Here’s a game for Dell - it’s a free-kick style game with a novel control that I need a lot more practice at to qualify for the 20% discounts on offer:

Ok, the World Cup piggy-backing feels a little ‘me-too’ but it’s a well produced game that held my attention and which has some tidy, practical elements - incentivised data capture, prize vouchers and leagues showing your country’s ranking.

Gamers don’t mind ads…

…and advertisers are learning to love gamers. Is the pithy headline to be distilled from the eye-wateringly impenetrable summary of a recent comScore report.

Ok, so gamers don’t really like ads but then who does?

That said, ads are an accepted part of the gamer’s landscape and most gamers accept the quid pro quo of ads and free content. Just as long as the publisher follows a consistent and ethical ad policy then the user knows what to expect and where the boundaries lie they can be deemed a necessary evil - like shaving or politicians.

However, the problem with this ‘trade-off’ approach for advertisers is 2 fold:

1. It increasingly relies on the brand being if not the ‘bad’ guy, at least the ‘tolerated but irritating’ guy, waving his arms from behind your screen saying ‘pssst - check this out’. Who wants to be that?
2. It assumes the current model for ad-funded content remains unchanged; with ads kept away from the content like foxes on a chicken farm.

But there is another way and advergames are a part of it.

Brands need to profitably engage with their audience and, whatever the medium, this needs to happen through good ideas - for tv programmes, events, websites and games. Only through strong original content can a brand engage a consumer, retain their attention and start a conversation.

I’m not the first to point this out but as our media consumption habits shift away from the old ‘interruptive’ models of brand involvement (and we herald the day when online overtakes tv on one of those ‘media usage’ graphs), brands need to recognise that conversations with consumers are going to become harder to start and trickier to maintain unless they stop going ‘pssst!’