Wednesday, October 05, 2005
"Videogame industry + interactive marketing = enormous opportunity."
iMedia Connection: The Gaming Evolution Comes to SF/BIG
Emma Brownell wrote an article for Imedia about an interactive marketing conference in San Francisco. The topic of interest: using gaming as a medium for marketing. Advertisers are interested in gaming because key demographic groups are spending less time with the traditional mass media. Marketers are scrambling to recapture their attention through the interactive media:
Brownell describes a presentation by Kate Everett-Thorp, "president of interactive advertising at AKQA," in which she describes how her company has sought to capture gamers attention by changing the form of their messages to fit the interactive nature of gaming:
Emma Brownell wrote an article for Imedia about an interactive marketing conference in San Francisco. The topic of interest: using gaming as a medium for marketing. Advertisers are interested in gaming because key demographic groups are spending less time with the traditional mass media. Marketers are scrambling to recapture their attention through the interactive media:
As of 2002, males in the 18- to 34-year-old category played as many hours of videogames as they spent watching TV. Currently, the videogame industry is worth $25 billion, with 110 million players worldwide. Videogames reach 70 percent of males aged 18 to 34.The key issue for interactive marketers is how to transform the advertising messages used in the mass media into the form and content that will engage interactive gamers.
Brownell describes a presentation by Kate Everett-Thorp, "president of interactive advertising at AKQA," in which she describes how her company has sought to capture gamers attention by changing the form of their messages to fit the interactive nature of gaming:
To reach gamers, marketers must evolve their communication plan: don't talk to gamers; let them "own" the advertising; take them on a journey; make sure there's an element of inclusion, and present the campaign as a quest for discovery.Advertising for gamers must mimic the form and logic of gaming, of pursuit, discovery, and collaboration in the creation of the message itself.
Everett-Thorp referred to the Halo 2 campaign that AKQA launched in 2004 as an example of how to target gamers. Initial Halo 2 pages launched with no English text, as not all gamers are English-speaking. Translating the text so that all gamers, across the globe, could read it would have been too expensive. Instead, AKQA teamed up with Bungie.org, which created a language called Covenant. Within 48 hours of the page launches, some gamers had decoded the language and published a decoder page. By the end of the week, 16 language translations had been published. And this was all before the website even went live.
Everett-Thorp cites this example not only because it was an extremely successful product launch, but also because it demonstrates the energy and capacity of the gaming population. Leverage that population as AKQA did, and you can, as Everett-Thorp said, stretch your budget to the max.
