Games Offer you a Unique Way to Entertain -- and sell at the same time!Whilst experimenting with social networks, user-generated content and on line video, marketers appear content to view games as little more than another advertising platform. The untapped potential of game playing lies in their ability to tell stories, thereby more closely linking brand benefits with game play and blurring the lines between brand and entertainment. Games, properly structured, fundamentally alter the customers perception to the presentation and content of your marketing messages thus making the advertisements themselves a source of meaningful information. Games allow Brands to become engaging, interactive and entertaining -- thereby providing something of value in exchange for attention. Brands such as Persil, Birds Eye and Quaker Oats have relied on game playing to create narratives that consumers want to be a part of. In the process, they've done more than just break through the clutter, or better position themselves in consumer's minds.Games remain one of the biggest untapped opportunities for marketers, for the simple fact that they are, indeed, engaging, interactive and entertaining. Well-conceived games require users' active attention and enable them to drive the storyline as they experience a world that can be entirely of a brand's making. Games represent a unique opportunity for brands to be the entertainment rather than just sponsor it.So what do original games get you?If you're Quaker Oats, you get year-over-year double-digit sales growth, as well as a marketing program that has generated significant revenue.
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Substantially more effective - The Interactive Communication Programme has been extensively researched by independent research organisations in Australia, The United Kingdom, U.S.A. Japan, Singapore, New Zealand and The Philippines.Numerous marketing research studies have been conducted to measure and document the sales impact of the interactive communication programme. In point of fact, measurements are always made on the incremental sales generated by each interactive ‘Event’ for every participating brand because the premise of interactive communication is on making advertising expenditure accountable. The results are presented to each client as a post evaluation.Below is just one summary as to just how much more cost-effective interactive communication is when compared with ALL-conventional marketing programmes.COST EFFECTIVNESSProfessor E.L. Roberto, PhD, Coca-Cola Foundation Professor of International Marketing reviewed the £5 million of independent research conducted on behalf of the Interactive “Event(s)” and provided this summary as to the techniques cost efficiency:“The Events’ participating advertisements generated recall scores that are more than 50% productive than normal advertising. The effect on purchase intention is just as impressive if not much more.All these productivity increments are attainable at a reasonably inexpensive budget. One Event Client revealed that for its participating brand, its quarter television expenditure was $5.7 million as compared to its Events’ budget of $0.5 million. This 1:10 ratio has been obtained in Events’ experience in other countries.”Source: AGB: Gallup: Martyn Research: Bourke: NOP. City Insights & more.More results are available over a wide range of categories upon request.
Mass communication, if it is to be successful, must take on many characteristics of interpersonal communication. Audience members must be able to give feedback. Media practitioners must be sensitive to the information contained in the feedback. The give and take can result in understanding or real communication.Advertising agencies need to change their limited definition of communication and media and see themselves as specialists in a range of techniques.The decline of the golden age of advertising agencies centred on the creative TV commercial has commenced. Unless they wake up to the changes that are occurring they risk becoming the first dinosaurs of the new media age. Most types of communication, especially the interpersonal variety, are two-way exchanges. To put it differently, advertising’s linear view ignores the fact that receivers react to messages by sending messages of their own. And if the message sender is not listening in turn…?In the past Advertising occurred when a group becomes too large for all members to contribute. One aspect of advertising is an unequal amount of “speaking”. Advertisers deliver their information to the mass audience, with limited opportunities, if any, for feedback. The audience, therefore, is unable to talk back in a two-way conversation the way they might in a small group setting and, as a result, do not feel involved, do not feel that the message has relevance to them as an individual.Agencies view communication as something one person “does” to others. In this linear communication model, communication is like giving an injection: a sender encodes ideas and feeling into some sort of message and then injects them by means of a channel (TV, Newspapers, radio, etc).Despite its simplicity, the linear view of communication isn’t completely accurate. For one thing it makes the questionable assumption that all communication involves encoding. A more obvious problem of the linear model is its suggestion that communication flows in one direction, from sender to receiver.
Personally I feel that there is a great deal of confusion within Advertising and Marketing circles as to what is happening and, more importantly, what is going to happen in the future. Without a doubt advertising can no longer base its existence on the sole basis (in the main) of a thirty-second TV-spot.What is desperately needed is an understanding of the word “communication” and then to apply those understandings to prepare cost effective marketing messages, thus saving your Clients heaps of money currently being wasted on one-way TV spots! We pioneered Interactive communication to the advertising and marketing community some 25 years ago, along the way we have amassed a vast amount of research and experience which, if you wish, we will be detailing here over time so that we can contribute some value to the industry.Mass Markets were fragmenting…for many decades before the Internet came on-stream, and since then, the net has enormously accelerated the fragmentation. No more can broadcast advertising shape the tastes and desires of some undifferentiated mass market. Ideas create new markets, unlike market research; interactive communication provides a more immediate way to find out if product ideas are any good.Mass Media were created to serve the marketing requirements of Corporations.Today, corporations must establish more intimate relationships with markets because that’s where the knowledge is. Engaging in conversations with relevant markets will become an important source of knowledge and innovation, the quality of this market intelligence has already (and will do so more in the future) proved to be more accurate than research and will determine market share.Without interactive communication your efforts to create new products and markets will be taking place in a vacuum. As your products come to reflect the information provided by the genuine conversations of interactive communication, instead of the ballyhoo and adversarial marketing tactics that poses as marketing today, companies will be far better served, and so will their customers.
Paul Ashby
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