The growing benefits of advergames
Advergames offer the opportunity of mining consumer data that is unheard of in traditional media.Advertisers have found that, in return for the value of the game-playing experience, the audience is far more likely to opt-in to sign up for future promotions and products, or share personal information with an advertiser seeking a richer database. Campaigns that integrate advergames will routinely get 50-75% of the participants choosing to opt-in to future messages or promotions. For example, Honda's contest to win a CR-V (see p. 136) enabled the car manufacturer to gather valuable data about potential customers.
Other advertisers have found that invaluable data can be gathered by offering players in-game choices related to a product.The resulting data can be used to create sophisticated psychographic profiles of customers in order to build better products and promotions in the future.
Branded online games can be produced for a lot less than the cost of games designed for the console, PC, or handheld markets.While PC and console games could take years and millions of dollars to create, a branded online game can be created in months, even weeks, with the cost of entry as low as US$5000-15 000.
Finally, the distribution costs of branded online games make advertisers drool. If a game is well targeted, has real play value, is innovative and doesn't beat players over the head with the branding or hard sell, the players themselves will become the distribution channel and buzz generators via forward-to-friend emails, blogs, chatrooms and word of mouth. Without the limitations of an expensive media spend, games can live on the Internet for a long time, virtually free. So build it well, and they will play.
It looks certain that the advergaming phenomenon will continue to develop, so investing now in how to best use the medium is a budget well spent. New platforms and gaming techniques are emerging all the time. The 'ilovebees' promotional game for Halo 2 and the MiniCooper hoax site, among others, can be credited with helping to pioneer the trend towards alternate reality gaming (ARG) or immersive gaming - a potentially huge vehicle for connected marketing strategies. ARG draws the gamer into a fantasy world that becomes entwined with their own reality via devices such as hoax websites, treasure hunts and pre-recorded phone calls.
In the UK in the 1980s, confectionery manufacturer Cadbury staged a pioneering branded treasure hunt via a printed book that sent people off to dig for golden eggs (in connection with its famous Cadbury's Creme Egg brand). A few years earlier author Kit Williams sent people in search of a golden hare if they could crack a set of clues buried in illustration and rhyme in his book Masquerade. Both books3 generated massive word of mouth and buzz. ARG takes the same idea, but has the advantage of the Internet with its ability to generate even more word of mouth and connect communities of people who have a common interest.
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