interactivity/ advergaming
Advergaming
Put together online games and advertising, either adding advertising to the game or game to advertising.Because advergaming is used to motivate transits to official pages, to communicate, to promote products or to reinforce the brand, always understood that those games have clearly didactic contents and never aggressive, malicious, dangerous, intrusive or inappropriate for receivers.
Because is interactive advertising so that, neither is intrusive nor annoying as conventional one. The game access is entirely voluntary, the user is absolutely free to leave it whenever wants and, if likes and wants, able to recommend it to other people (or not). Advergaming is conceptually linked with viral marketing (user to user transmission). Normally, a user game recommends an average of three friends or acquaintances.
Because the traditional advertise media is saturated and loses effective. Currently an advertising campaign has a response rate of 1%, in magazines/press, 0’75%, in radio, 0’55% and in telephonic marketing, 1’5%. On the contrary, an advergaming game usually has a response rate of 30% and an average to be recommended to friends or acquaintances of 22%. Moreover, the average time connection (and attention) to one of this games is infinitely superior to the time devoted to a TV commercial, press or an advertising banner. The average connection is between 5 to 35 minutes, but there are cases of connection for hours.
Because, increasingly, young people (and not so young) have more visual culture and are moving in a more technological atmosphere. In 2005, a 69’4% of Spanish children and teenagers between 14 and 18 surf the net daily. It is becoming more frequent to stay much more time in front of the computer instead of television. There is also an increasing use on mobile phone games: currently in Spain there are 600.000 downloads per month and 2009 forecast is to be multiplied per ten that amount.
Because is cheaper than the traditional advertising. At the beginning Advergaming was characteristic only for Coca Cola, Nike, BMW, Mc Donalds… Nowadays, many small and medium companies are being added. In 2009 it was the only kind of advertising which increase the investment. And all of this, in a context of decline of conventional advertising media, like television and press.
Because allows constant and real self assessment of the incidence: how much people are visiting us, who are they, what they do, how much time, where they come, etc. it is also frequent that companies use advergaming in order to know their customers preferences. For instance, Ford used a car racing game so as for asking to his potential customers what color they chose for a car. Nike analyzed, through a basketball game, which sneakers were chosen by youth between lots of models (which were not still for sale) to wear his NBA leaders.
Because is possible to interconnect with mobile phones. The fact that presently in Spain, the mobile phone has get inside the market for a 105%, has contributed to its extension. So almost everybody has one and, even, there are people who have 2 or 3. And people always carried it. This turns it into a new media with infinite possibilities. Specially the youngest sector, normally use the mobile to play daily. Heavy users (young people between 14 and 25 years) spend about 25 minutes per day on mobile games. When a user receive a likely game, will recommend it to an average of 7 of their friends or acquaintances. A 90% of friends and acquaintances who receive one of these recommendations become users of the game. This data, which were also registering a progressive increase, are devastating and provoke that mobile games are a great alternative to the current advertising channels.
