Gaming Special: Advergaming

With the exponential growth of mobile digital users has come a massive rise in gamers and within that group a changing demographic that is more female, more mature and more sophisticated. For marketers this has opened up such opportunities as the wonderful world of branded gaming but, says Adrian Pennington, with an increasingly competitive playing field advertisers are having to up their game

It’s only human nature to want to have fun. This desire surely explains the centuries old, global popularity of game playing, which has been rebooted in recent years by the ubiquity of mobile touchscreen devices.

Brands haven’t been slow to catch on, incorporating web-based games into their digital campaigns almost as a matter of course. Over time such advergames (also known as viral games, branded games, promotional or browser games) have had to become more sophisticated and of higher quality to be heard above the crowd. “Between 2000 to 2003 it seemed all I did was make some form of branded game,” says Andy Hood who leads the creative development team at AKQA. “You’d be able to get a game to go viral because there was an absence of anything else like it. Now, because of the massive rise of throwaway game apps, you’ve got so much to compete with that you have to shout out.”

Initially advergames were assumed to be best suited to products targeting young males, the mainstream console gaming demographic, with the sector dominated by games selling deodorant, action movies, beer and burgers. In 2006, Burger King’s Xbox titles were a particular high point, selling more than two million units in the month of release.

According to Richard Smith, account director at Mindshare UK and author of The Future of Gaming report, advertisers stayed away from gaming when it was mainly on consoles, “as the lead times were long and publishers weren’t interested anyway”. However, as the gaming audience has widened, so has the advergaming market, resulting in such projects as the London Science Museum Launchball physics game of 2008 [see inset] and Disney Fairies: Lost & Found of 2012. The latter is aimed at the growing market of tweenage girls – today, according to the Entertainment Software Association, 48 per cent of online gamers are now female. Both Launchball and Disney Fairies were developed by London-based game studio Preloaded. “Launchball was really our first foray into games with purpose,” says Phil Stuart, Preloaded’s creative director, “the player reception and critical success galvanized our belief in the power of games to do more than entertain.” Other Preloaded titles – Axon for the Wellcome Collection and Thingdom, also for Science Museum, were created to support real-life galleries, but exist as standalone experiences outside of the physical space. They caught the eye of Learning Technologies Group which acquired Preloaded in May to target what it expects to be a global market for simulation and games-based learning that will reach $9bn by 2017. “Advergaming has huge potential,” states Damien Roux, CEO of Edinburgh-based digital agency Drimlike. “It grabs people’s attention and engages them without the need for an obvious banner. Brands can convey messages effectively without being overly restricted. This makes standing out more achievable – regardless of the brand.” That engagement brings ancillary benefits; as another advergame specialist Koko Digital states on its website, branded games offer “a combination of brand awareness, product promotion, engagement, customer acquisition, data capture, direct sales, social likes, web traffic, and last but not least – fun!”

Millennial and mobile

Video games revenue surpassed box office, movie rentals, book and music sales in the US a decade ago but connected mobile devices have further changed the media’s advertising potential. The UK video games industry grew by four per cent in 2012 according to trade body TIGA, with an increased number of games produced for mobile and online platforms a key stimulus.

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, increased smartphone penetration – which will reach 75 per cent of the UK population this year – combined with tablet penetration (set to hit 50 per cent by the end of 2014), contributed to a surge in mobile advertising in 2013 of 17.5 per cent year-on-year to reach just over £3bn. “Advergames may not appeal to hardcore gamers, but a millennial audience brought up on technology expects to engage with a brand in a different way and will tune out traditional forms of advertising,” says Poke founder Nick Farnhill. “Choosing a game for that audience is a smart move and putting that game on a mobile platform is smarter still.”

Smartphone and mobile devices have brought gaming to the masses, especially with the popularization of microgames, such as Candy Crush Saga. Henric Swahn, lead game designer at games studio UNIT9, speaks of the “massive audience ready to consume this content at a rapid pace. The gamification of advertising is becoming a natural language. Games retain users and can be highly cost-effective to produce compared with TVC content, and – when done well – increase brand loyalty exponentially.”

So online and mobile gaming is rife and mobile ad spend is on the up but where do the two intersect? Branded game products don’t just have to have good gameplay, they need to coordinate with the overall visual identity of the brand and communicate key aspects of its marketing drive.

Rubber ducks and wolves to lure the players in

“Using games as part of a communications strategy is stronger than it’s ever been,” says Paul Bennun, CCO at content creation company Somethin’ Else. “You have to look at games no differently from any other kind of content and as part of the overall comms strategy. We know that the value of the 30-second spot is diminished and we also know that any sort of content that doesn’t work the way the internet works becomes invisible. Games are a perfect fit for an interactive media that fits into social media allowing people to share and discover content.”

Bennun believes that a strong strategic sense of brand during the design process and during media planning is essential, but “the game has to be a good game first and foremost. It can’t be an afterthought to the comms strategy.” A good example is Somethin’ Else’s The Nightjar for Wrigley’s. “We said we’d only do it as long as we could build a game that stands on its own two feet,” says Bennun. “Games can deliver on the promise of the brand. All traditional advertising can do is talk about the promise, it cannot embody it like games can.”

Poke scored a hit with RubberDuckZilla in 2009 (building on Mother’s TV campaign for Coca-Cola brand Oasis) but is wary of clunky experiences that people play only once or twice. “What entices someone to immerse themselves in a game is so subtle and so nuanced that specialist game agencies like Playerthree are best to partner with on this type of material,” says Poke’s Farnhill. Playerthree recently released Wolfblood Shadow Runners in tandem with CBBC show Wolfblood. “It unlocks a unique story mode for the game and also story levels aligned to the show itself,” says Playerthree’s co-founder David Streek. “It may not be advertising a paid product, but it is clearly part of an acceptance from brands that games are important to their audience.”

Get the comms communicating with the content

Typically, the agency creates the concept either in addition to the campaign as a whole, or as a stand-alone creative solution to the business problem, while the lead creative works with game developers to deliver the final product. “The process requires both agency and client to be open-minded in translating the advertising message through the lens of gaming and being prepared to let the skills of a good games designer interpret the idea,” says Tom Ewart, founding partner of agency The Corner. “Advergaming’s ability to allow people to interact with, contribute to and control the dialogue is hugely appealing to a generation of consumers who experience this in other aspects of their lives, and expect the same from the brands they engage with,” he adds.

Some brands assume that they can’t work with a games studio because they already work with a media agency. “This isn’t the case,” says Drimlike’s Roux. “Media agencies should in fact work more closely with companies like us to achieve the best results for the client.” Naturally that is a view shared by other digital outfits. “Very few agencies retain teams of people who are specialised to develop games,” points out AKQA’s Hood. “The sophistication of modern games means it’s better for an agency to partner up.” Somethin’ Else’s Bennun warns that some agencies outsource a game then pass the creation off as their own. “You need an organisation that can look in two directions at once: a gaming company that understands the language of creative and media.” This is important because once you’ve built the game you have to tell people about it, to ‘shout’ amid hundreds of thousands of competing products. “You need a game that makes people want to talk about it,” he says. “You can’t design the game and not the associated media strategy at the same time, which is why social media agencies divorced from content won’t get anywhere.”

Havas Worldwide asked Somethin’ Else to devise games ideas about being a good host for whisky brand Chivas. “We could have proposed something like a dinner dash where the gameplay simulates running around a virtual house to make your guests happy, but making a game that actually made social gatherings go well seemed like a far better idea,” says Bennun. “Social gatherings are affected by our personal digital technology, so we decided to create a social game – MASHTUN – that made players look at each other rather than their devices.” 

Sometimes a game just happens to be the most appropriate solution to the brief. “It can sometimes seem prudent to take an existing game and attach the entire game to the brand,” says AKQA’s Hood. “We did this with Real Racing, creating Real Racing GTI for VW in 2010 with amazing results. With this you can then get an excellent existing game, that may already have an audience, and achieve the same reach and awareness that you would otherwise have had to undertake a significant design and build task for.” An example of the latter case is AKQA’s football game StarPlayer for Heineken, which was conceived, designed and built entirely in-house. “We didn’t set out to build a game but looked at what had to be achieved for Heineken and concluded that building a game was the way to answer the brief.” 

Weaving the branding into the game

Mindshare believe it’s vital to understand brands in the context of gamers, not just the games they play. Other considerations are: no interrupting – even casual gamers object to brands interrupting them – and giving consumers something, such as micropayments of in-game currency, in return for interaction. “The most successful tend to follow the rules of gaming, and naturally weave a brand or product message in, not the ones that try and behave like a traditional ad in the gaming space,” says The Corner’s Ewart.

According to the IAB’s games advertising report the ideal is to provide a clear link between the brand and the game, without interfering with player engagement. Indeed, in the best advergames, removing the branding from the game would diminish the overall gaming experience. “Stand out work will always show that a brand’s message has been understood by the agency and conveyed in the game narrative and that it is appropriate to the audience,” says Farnhill. “You also need to invest quite heavily in creating something with incredibly high production values.”

For Roux, simple, addictive games are always going to work. “But I think we’ll see serious games gaining more and more prominence. Using a serious game to convey a serious message can really help a brand or organisation to have a bigger influence on their demographic.”

State of the art in the field is The Scarecrow by Louisiana’s Moonbot Studios from a brief by CAA Marketing. Its Pixar-quality animated short for Mexican food chain Chipotle went viral on YouTube. The 10 million plus views were translated into over 530,000 downloads of an iOS arcade-style game app, also by Moonbot, delivering on the brand’s championing of responsible food production, plus, players can win restaurant coupons. “It has incredible production values,” says Farnhill. “Some users play it three to four times a week and there is so much good data Chipotle is able to draw, from email addresses to phone numbers.” Ewart says of the game: “It plays by the rules of gaming, the brand message is clear and it shows how real commitment to a genuine gaming experience and investment in quality production really pays off.”

Virtual reality could be the next big disruption in advertising, especially where advergames are concerned. Thanks to the recent partnership of Facebook’s Oculus VR with Samsung, headsets will soon be widely accessible to a large mobile market. “This is exciting because VR has the potential to create a strong emotional resonance with the user, fully immersing them in an experience that the brain perceives as reality,” says UNIT9’s Swahn. “It’s because of this physical immersion that virtual reality and wearables will become the future of advergaming.”