Doing my weekly browsing of digital marketing news I came across a blog entry by Steve Olenski called “The Big Opportunity Marketers Are Missing Right Now”
http://www.stargroup1.com/blog/big-opportunity-marketers-are-missing-right-now
Olenski argues that on-line social gaming is a huge opportunity for marketers given its size (around 250 million users a month of which 59% of the adult category are women). In his view companies undervalue this medium to advertise to their customers, only 16% of the companies surveyed by Forrester have plans to use social games in their U.S. marketing strategies in the next year. Additionally, only 19% believe on-line social gaming will become a more effective marketing vehicle in the next three years.
Although I think Olenski is right, i.e. companies should definitely be advertising in online social gaming, I believe he misses to touch on the real potential of social games. Marketers should start thinking of how to use on-line social games around their brands to engage current and potential customers around something that is entertaining for them. Companies could build simple games that can potentially go viral and gather a lot of data from their customers. People are playing an entertaining on-line game while the company is gathering information about the customers’ interactions with the products. The benefit is three-fold, first it is a vehicle for brand building, second it is an opportunity to introduce product features and benefits to clients, and third marketers can disguise conjoint analyses studies in games.
The Old Spice guy comes to mind. After the success of the TV ad P&G spent a significant amount of money to shoot more than a hundred responses to influencers (celebrities, bloggers, etc.). Although a very smart move to extract more mileage from the ad idea, P&G could have gone even further and built a simple on-line game (e.g. the guy responding with predefined lines to questions posed by the users, similar to the idea behind Burger King’s subservient chicken)
In conclusion, marketers can use on-line social gaming to let their creativity lose and build viral games that allow them to pursue several marketing objectives at the same time.
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