Changing The Game
Changing the Game reveals how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; and to supercharge productivity. It is written for a general audience, and includes a wide variety of case studies, practical tips, and warnings of pitfalls to avoid when creating or using video games for business purposes.
Reviewed positively in The Economist, Inc. Magazine and The Financial Times, it’s written by David Edery (pictured), Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade and Ethan Mollick, studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. You can order it here.
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In certain situations, the benefits of an advergame can go well beyond increased brand preference and purchase intent.
Advergames, unlike so many other forms of advertisement, enable a marketer to form a direct relationship with a potential customer. At its most basic level, this may simply mean encouraging players to register with their names, e-mail addresses, and demographic information before they can play a game.
While this is not the right strategy for many advergames, it can be very effective for games that are of particularly high quality, that are narrowly targeted, or that offer compelling prizes to players. Contact and demographic information can then be used to notify players about updates to a game, game-related contests and tournaments, and other information. Players who specifically opt-in can also be sent other advertising messages.
At a more advanced level, advergames can also be used to study consumer behavior and even test the attractiveness of new product features. For example, in 2001 Nike released Nike Shox, a basketball advergame which enabled players to customize the color of their avatar’s shoes before engaging in a slam-dunk contest.
Although it’s unclear whether Nike actually studied the customization choices of its players, one can easily see how they might have used that information to forecast consumer interest in different shoe colors. General Motors understands this opportunity better than most companies. In 2007, it launched Chevy Cobalt Labs, a Web-based advergame that enables players to not only race against each other, but also substantially customize the features and paint job of their virtual Cobalt car.
Interestingly, Chevy Cobalt Labs requires players to carefully consider which features they most desire for their vehicle, as nearly every possible modification costs some amount of virtual currency. Additional currency can be earned through in-game activities such as winning races, or out-of-game activities, such as completely filling out your profile. By requiring players to spend virtual currency on the vehicle features they desire, General Motors has given consumers a great reason to do useful things, like tell the company more about themselves.
More importantly, General Motors is learning something about real-life consumer preferences. After all, if in real life you care more about a car’s spoiler than its wheels, you’re likely to use your first allotment of virtual currency to buy a sweet spoiler for your car, and leave the fancy wheels for later.
Making a Viral Advergame
One good way to understand what defines a good advergame is to examine a bad one, such as H&R Block’s Financial Match Quiz. This game, which was launched on Facebook in 2008, encourages players to test their compatibility with friends by answering stimulating questions like “How do you feel about debt?” and “Do you know what tax deductions you qualify for?” Unfortunately, the ordinary person is unlikely to enjoy revealing financial problems or financial ignorance to friends. A good advergame, at bare minimum, should be fun and viral (that is, likely to be shared with friends and family). Financial Match Quiz attempts to exploit the popularity and viral nature of the stereotypical compatibility game, but is ultimately burdened with such dry content that it is neither fun nor viral.
In general (and unsurprisingly), the more fun a game is, the more likely people are to tell their friends about it, so the most important component of making a game viral is to make it extremely fun. Viral behavior can also be driven by competitive or collaborative activities, by the desire to achieve, and by the desire to share things with friends—especially when the act of sharing bears concrete rewards.
These powerful viral factors merit a closer look:
1. Competitive or collaborative activities. This is an area in which video games excel. A game that offers compelling multiplayer activity, of either a competitive or a cooperative nature, will generally be more viral than the ordinary advertisement. After all, when a video game seems fun, people will naturally invite their friends to play it with them. Collaborative games are particularly compelling in this regard, since they appeal to both very competitive people (who will want help beating the game) and not-so-competitive people (who simply enjoy playing with others). A clever advergame might also use attractive prizes and group multiplayer competition to encourage friends to join forces and, as a result, maximize their prize-winning potential. Intel’s Silicon Commander employed this tactic to great effect.
2. The desire to achieve. Many games use high scores and other goal-oriented achievement systems for example, “complete this level in ten minutes or less and win a virtual gold medal”—to encourage repeat play. These features, when properly employed, can be used to encourage players to spread the word about an advergame. For example, when players achieve a high score, they might be given an opportunity to challenge friends to beat their score. Nike Shox enabled players to e-mail their high score and a snapshot of their best slam-dunk to friends—along with a link to the game itself, of course. The inclusion of the snapshot was a nice twist, and hints at the broader tactics that advertisers can use to make game-based achievement and self-promotion an even more compelling experience for players.
The desire to share good things: Video games—particularly those of the casual variety—occasionally enable players to give each other “virtual gifts.” These gifts vary widely, from clothing for an avatar, to special food for a virtual pet, to allotments of raw virtual currency. Gift giving, though often motivated primarily by friendly impulse, can also be a self-serving act if it somehow benefits the giver in-game—for example, by rewarding the giver every time one of the giver’s friends accepts a gift. This, of course, is no different from real-world promotional schemes in which consumers are rewarded with discounts or free prizes when they convince friends to try a product or service. Advergames that incorporate a virtual economy of goods and/or currency can benefit greatly from an effective gift-giving model.
In addition, the motivation to share user-created content with friends can be an especially powerful way to make a game more viral. When players have created content that they are proud of, it is only natural that they will want to share it with friends. Some advertisers even use contests to amplify the viral effects of user-generated content in advergames. For example, Chevy Cobalt Labs includes a feature called “Tricked or Trashed,” which encourages visitors to vote between two user-created vehicles, “trashing” the worst of the two. As you can imagine, this provides great incentive for more involved players to refer their friends to the game and, in doing so, secure more votes for the car they have created. “Tricked or Trashed” logged more than 400,000 votes within a three-month period, many of which were motivated by the viral nature of the game.
Changing The Game
Changing the Game reveals how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; and to supercharge productivity. It is written for a general audience, and includes a wide variety of case studies, practical tips, and warnings of pitfalls to avoid when creating or using video games for business purposes.
Reviewed positively in The Economist, Inc. Magazine and The Financial Times, it’s written by David Edery (pictured), Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade and Ethan Mollick, studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. You can order it here.