The Games Brands Play - Deck

Mark TerryCreative Directorbrand-e

Steve MullinsContent Directorbrand-e

the games brands play

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZdZsFZ1mW0

old brands, old games


the gamesIn-game advertisingBillboardsHoardingsSportswear

Branded gamingOnline gamesOnline and mobile apps

Viral gamingARGsClue-solving

Product placementSocial gamesVideo games


the metrics


facebooking


apps

Downloads: 12.5 millionPlaytime: 1.5 million hoursGlobal play-off: 300,000 players in 80 countries


games on


i am playr


roles brands play

I Am PlayrNike augments gaming experienceNike rewards the victorNike enhances player status

Other gamesPart of the entertainmentPromotional rewardsAids group activityFosters communicationsEnables players to drive fast cars

eg, role of brands eg enabler, promo, enhance expce, entertmt


game/brand analysis

ntertainngage

mpowerxcel






marketing plays

It’s about building brand advocacy

So, how different are games from any other kind of branded comms?



In the ever-evolving world of digital advertising and marketing, brands who work with Matmi achieve astonishing results. We engage brands and buyers in successful, loyal relationships by creating pioneering online, social and mobile experiences. That’s why many companies – including some of the world’s leading brands - have already joined us and grown in a place we call the Matmisphere. We’d love to meet you there.


Branded Entertainment

vs

Traditional Advertising


TraditionalTV advertising is a great excuse to have a break and a cup of tea!

TV advertising is one way (usually, hurry up IPTV)

Very difficult to track results

Costly

Harder to target

Print advertising is in massive decline (for good reasons)

The captive audience is engaging with other forms of media

Even if users are watching TV they are often Media-stacking

No instant purchase of product available


Internet Advertising is Huge

Internet Advertising can be targeted

Great conversion tracking

Wonderful Click thru rates

Better ROI

Greater Range

Up-dateable adverts on the fly

Allows experimentation

Users can click thru to purchase

Positive experience and engagement builds loyalty

Adverts can be engaging and users will allow spread


Advergaming is one of the fastest growing areas of the Internet.

Why?


Philips wanted to promote their Sonicare Kids Toothbrush to kids and their parents in the UK and Germany.


Total visits

13.5 million

Average view time

7 minutes

Total clicks

216,000


Lily Allen already had a strong online presence and a reputation for cutting edge digital marketing. The campaign to promote the artists’ second album “It’s Not Me, It’s You” with Parlophone set some challenging objectives:


• To create an innovative global marketing tool.

• To reach a new and relevant audience for Lily Allen (ie -not listening to radio or watching TV).

• To upsell Lily Allen content, drive physical sales and pre-orders.

• To capture consumer data for future marketing


Over a million plays per month from 70+ countries worldwide

Average dwell time of 4.37 minutes

Over 6.5 million plays

300,000 click thrusSubsequent analysis by Parlophone showed a direct correlation between penetration rates for the game per head of population, with the chart position of the single and album in that country.


The client’s opinion

"Escape the Fear is the promo video of the digital age. It delivers engagement, interaction, loyalty and sales opportunities on a new level for our artists. The game has delivered tens of thousands of click-thrus, pre-orders and downloads, and even features on the album CD itself. The results speak for themselves – we’re absolutely delighted with this launch."

Dan Duncombe, Digital Director, Parlophone/EMI


In February 2007, Comic Relief issued its “Digital Challenge” to any person or organisation to help it "Spread the most red online" as part of its fund raising efforts.


We created a branded viral advergame carrying the “Water is life” message in a subtle but powerful way. Players help villagers reconnect water pipes for themselves, their animals and crops after the pipes have been attacked by hyenas.


The results were stunning: No.1 on the worldwide viral chart on the eve of Red Nose Day 2007

2 weeks after release, the worldwide viral chart confirmed that “Let It Flow” had become the fastest growing viral game it had ever tracked45 Million plays

10% Click thru to Comic Relief site"Let It Flow" never left the worldwide Top 20 online games and was No.1 five times in total.


Virtual band, Gorillaz, are in their element online so it seemed only right to promote their 2010 album, Plastic Beach, in cyberspace too.Our brief was to bring Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach album to life online and on mobile, in 2D and 3D, free-to-play and pay-to-play, using concepts based on soundtracks from the album. Nothing too complicated then!


2 million plays of Chapters 1 & 2 in the first six months after launchAn average dwell time of 6.9 minutes equates to 26 years’ worth of brand exposure for the band worldwide

200,000 Click thru’sThousands of purchases of the iPhone and iPad app


“This campaign was a challenging brief for everyone involved because like Lily Allen before them, the Gorillaz are digital innovators. We had to have partners on board with one foot in the future. Matmi’s experience, experimental attitude and their working relationship with Apple for the iPad release were critical. If you’re looking for ground-breaking digital marketing with ground-breaking results, look no further.”Dan Duncombe, Vice President, Digital, EMI Music


Vimto’s new UK website was part of an ambitious £5 million rebrand for the 101 year old soft drink in 2009. Its overall objective was to change perceptions of the brand in the teen-to-early-30s age group, and drive up sales.The central creative elements of the campaign are the Seriously Mixed Up Fruit – a quirky trio of characters based on the fruit contents of the drink. Raspberry, Grape and Blackcurrant will do anything to get “mushed” into Vimto.


Independent research showed that the digital elements of Vimto’s 2009 re-brand campaign had the highest cut-through of any media, delivered the highest return on investment and created the highest levels of engagement (talkability factor and pass-on rate).


“Vimto and Matmi are very compatible brands; quirky, fun and full of surprises. It’s no wonder that we’ve never been short of ideas – only the time we need to do them!“Our rebrand in 2009 sent sales through the roof – almost double our targets. Although the new creative concept had most exposure through traditional advertising, it was the digital elements which had the most appeal to our teenage audience.“Matmi really has its finger on the pulse when it comes to digital engagement and understanding the audience. On the new website, teenagers get to do things that their parents would tell them off for, for example. That’s brilliant!When you visit the new site, you don’t just look at it and read lots of text; you listen, play, have fun, get your mates involved and get a full-on Vimto experience. This is what’s created the ‘talkability’ factor in the campaign’s results, and Matmi should be very proud of that.Emma Hunt, Senior Brand Manager, Vimto Soft Drinks

58 1

EVOLUTION OF GAMING AND HOW TO PLAY THE GAME

Jeff Pabst, MicrosoftHead of Ad Planning and Strategy, IEB

The Evolution of Games Advertising…

500

450

400

350

300

250

200

150

100

50

US

D $

$ in

Mill

ions

1983 1993 1995………2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Beyond..... .....

Dr Pepper1st Branded

I Phone Game

Burger King1st BrandedXbox Game

1st Adver-gamePepsi Invaders

Atari 2600

$189million*

$299million*

$1 billionIn 2014*

1st in-gameAd GTA III1st CD-ROM

Chexquest

*Source: Branded Entertainment Market Forecast 2007-2012, PQ media, Screen Digest 2010

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pepsiinvaders.JPG

http://www.coca-cola.com/template1/index.jsp?locale=en_GB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chexquest.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GTA3boxcover.jpg

Participative Branded Entertainment

Content choice creates breaking point…

Everything is available everywhere. Now what?

Internet generation demands participation..

There is no one way street at any stage of the ecosystem

http://twitter.com/

Gamification of everything

How do people Play?D

epth

& In

volv

emen

tSi

mpl

icity

& Im

med

iacy

Narrative Fun Creative Fun

Thrilling Fun Social Fun

Younger females

Older females

Younger males

Older males

Creativity and life interestFantasy and Escapism

Games allow brands to energize consumers and spark the viral effect...

Audience Reach

Engagement

Discoverability

Relevancy

Innovation

Flora Campaign

66

Brands in Social Games What the gamers say

Social Media Research: Farmville & McDonalds

Social gaming has become HUGE…

At its peak FarmVille had nearly 84 million monthly active users…

…last month CityVille peaked at around 101 million users

Audiences this big are attractive to advertisers

We wanted to look into this fast growing area…

The Game and the Brand

One of the biggest social games in the world

One of the biggest brands in the world

The collaboration between the two seemed ideal for researching the effects of branding on social gaming

How FarmVille works

Farmville is a real time farm simulation game available as an app on Facebook.

Players manage a virtual farm, ploughing land, planting growing and harvesting crops, tress and bushes and raising livestock.

This is my farm!

The McDonalds’ McCafe campaign

The McDonalds’ McCafe campaign ran for just one day on the 6th October 2010

Campaign only ran in the US and Canada although it was announced globally

Users could - visit the McDonalds farm- receive virtual McCafe coffee enabling them to farm at double the normal speed- get a McDonalds branded hot air balloon to decorate their farm

The McDonalds farm

Method - Buzz research

Ahead of carrying out more quantifiable research in this area, we conducted some initial social media analysis of the McDonalds promotion within Farmville to gauge some of the issues of branding within social games

Using Buzz research we undertook a social web-search to assess what gamers were saying online about the promotion. This procedure looks for mentions of Farmville associated with either McDonalds or McCafe between 1st – 10th October

This is not representative, but it does produce some interesting initial findings

Three search terms were used:

“Farmville AND McDonalds”“Farmville AND McCafe” “Zynga AND McDonalds”

Harvesting buzz: We searched Message boards, Social Network sites (i.e. Facebook), Blogs, Microblogs, Video/

photo sharing sites etc. using an auto discovery spider

Volume of results

The search found 1,696 posts in total with an average of 170 posts a day

Conversation started on Facebook, which peaked on the 3rd and again on the 7th, but was overtaken by the large volume of posts on message boards and forums

Campaign day

Anticipation buzz for 5 days prior to campaign

Post campaign buzz for a further 4 days

The buzz begins…

On the 5th October, the Farmville welcome screen was changed to include the McDonalds branding

This lead to a thread of 394 posts on the Zynga Community Forums discussing and trying to predict what the offer would be – a promising start

What were they saying?

The audience were ‘up for it’ but initial discussions on fan blogs suggested it was not entirely clear to many how they were supposed to engage with the McDonalds content

Some even mention visiting branches and calling customer services about the promotion

Some execution issues

The campaign fell short of some expectations as not perceived as rewarding enough

The hot air balloon was just ornamental whilst many experienced FarmVille users ‘lock’ their farmer within scenery, making a speed power-up unnecessary

Also, frustration from non US gamers

People outside the USA and Canada were disappointed - they had seen the flash screen but did not have access to the promotion

Despite this there were no comments rejecting the idea of brands appearing within FarmVille

Issues were down to

- The creative execution- Uncertainty of what to do- Lack of reward- The promotion not being available to them

…so a significant proportion of the negative comments came about because players were in fact so keen to engage

Zynga bore the brunt of criticism rather than McDonalds

There was also a lot of positive buzz

The vast majority of buzz was neutral – generally people who comment online are generally those with strong opinions one way or the other so neutral buzz is considered to be a sign of a healthy campaign

In fact, looking at all responses there was more positive feedback than negative

The positive buzz

Centred around a good ‘fit’ and positivity about the balloon and buildings

Analysis of emotion of buzz

Words denoting “achieve” and “social” are strongly associated – we feel that when a brand gives a sense of achievement within the game, the campaign really starts to work for that brand

This measure scores posts on the presence of words, which are categorised into 16 emotions:

The measure to push

Conclusions - how to plan your in-game campaign

Having conducted this initial exploratory look at brands within social gamers, we are looking to quantify the impact on participating brands using more traditional/ representative research

However at this stage we would offer the following advice if you’re planning a campaign:

1. Play the game… live it… understand it… get into it!

2. If possible link the brand with a real and significant benefit, reward or achievement – this will add enormous perceived value to the brand

3. As with any ad campaign, understand the medium

Final thought: Branding in games is powerful. It’s even more powerful when done properly

Steve Mullins, brand-e (Moderator)Paul Armstrong, MindshareJeff Coghlan, MatmiGilles Storme, RockYou Jeff Pabst, MicrosoftMax Willey, BDRC Continental Margaret Robertson, Hide&Seek

The Games Brands Play - Deck

Business

Transcript of The Games Brands Play - Deck