SERIOUS GAMING, A TOOL FOR BRANDS TO BUILD AWARENESS & ENGAGEMENT
Following our first post on serious games as a learning tool, we will take you to the Marketing and Advertising area which has increasingly used serious gaming as a tool to build, retain Awareness and Engagement.
The development of the Internet has reshaped the Media, Marketing and Advertising industry. The famous “convergence of content” theorized years ago is now real.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE CROWD CULTURE PHENOMENA
Audience has shown greater interest in connectivity, instantaneity and widened their habits of consuming content and products to other formats (e.g. transmedia, deep media, e-games), other devices (e.g. tablets, smart phones) and other aspects (E-commerce, E-payment, Bitcoins, etc.).
The challenge for brands and marketing department is to take a competitive advantage of this digital convergence by focusing on the awareness and engagement from and/or towards the Audience. Indeed, social media have completely modified the branding approach of structures. Digital crowd have become strong innovators and have contributed to the emergence of a new phenomenon “the crowd culture”. Consequently, organizations have increased their collaboration with crowd cultures in order to better attain their audience and support their brands.
Some of them have been adopting “the crowd culture” phenomena for years by incorporating it in their infiltration strategy. A good example is Red Bull which focuses on sports, culture and lifestyle. Therefore, all their brand initiatives (Partnership of events, sportsmen / women, teams crowd with Red Bull TV channel, GoPro Channel, etc.) strengthened its positioning and provided market outlets not only for its products but also for its brand.
SERIOUS GAMING OR ADVERGAMES, A NEW WAY TO ENGAGE AND BUILD AWARENESS
Additionally to the crowd culture, serious gaming can be regarded as a tool for brands to ignite awareness and engagement on those different channels and attract consumers to specific products.
It presents several advantages that can be summarized below:
- High level of retention and memorization: Retention time is very low for classic advertising channels (e.g. less than 30 seconds for TV, 2 seconds for online) but much higher for gaming (2 to 30 minutes). This a great opportunity for engaging and build awareness as long as the ads are timely placed. It also increases memorization (X10 times).
- Interactivitivity and implication maximum: Serious gaming permits a better understanding and involvement of the audience, consumer and receiving better feedback. Combining classic and online brand advertising campaign can have an overall positive impact.
- Personalization: Serious gaming can adapt to the needs and objectives of the brand.
- Positive and non-invasive advertising: When it is timely, rightly placed and fits to the context, it can be regarded as positive and non-invasive advertising.
- Trafic generation: thanks to serious gaming, the brand will increase its online awareness and add a little bit of fun.
- Online gaming: Current trends is online gaming and therefore adapting advertising message thanks to serious game /advergames resonate more efficiently to the audience.
BEST VITRINE FOR SERIOUS GAMING ARE SPORTS, ESPORTS
There are numerous examples of successful advertising incorporating serious gaming and engagement but one of the most impactful and simple one for me was the Oreo Commercial and Follow up at the SuperBowl 2013
Why ?
Their success was to combine classic commercial with digital one in a lively way with a serious gaming touch.
And a responsiveness to an unexpected event (Blackout) with a ‘dunk in the dark’ tweet which engaged thousands of fans in a couple of seconds.
Source:
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/07/10/marketing-moment-101-oreo-wins-super-bowl-dunk-dark-tweet
