Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

How do you engage an audience that is barraged with marketing messages and are not interested in hearing about your brand?

The answer used to be disruptive experiences which often led to more annoying and shocking ads in more places (see above).

Thankfully marketers are moving away from disruption and toward adding value as the means to engage a potential customer. Now the question becomes:  What can you do to add value and how do you successfully integrate this with your brand or product?

One answer is to add elements of play to your marketing, or more appropriately, adding elements of marketing to a fun customer experience.

At a recent conference I attended I had the pleasure of hearing Ken Eklund speak on "The Seriousness of Play".  The talk underscored what I experience firsthand in playing games with my kids: play is a great enabler of creative thought, social interaction, memory and learning.  "Gaming is common ground, it allows marketers to engage with customers and change their relationship with them.  Think about the Olympics impact on foreign relations." says Mr. Eklund.

To give you a sense of what I am talking about below are a few examples of using games to engage an audience: 

Last week was a pretty big week for gamers. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had record opening sales. It made $310 million in one day. I'll repeat that. It made $310 million in one day. Activision, the maker of Call of Duty franchise, attributes the success to the CoD brands uniquely engaging experience-a combination of compelling story line and rich cinematic feel.

That was the second time last week that I heard "cinematic" being used to reference a video game. The other being PS3s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. I've been hearing a lot about this game over the past few months. It's won 15 gaming awards. IGN.com rated Uncharted 2 at 9.5 (it's also an editors choice). And I also read one article where the writer bought a new TV just so he could enjoy the full visual splendor that Uncharted 2 unleashes.

So how amazing is Uncharted 2? Well, after playing for two hours and switching back to television (in HD no less) I thought my cable was broke because the picture looked so bad. Now, I'm not trying to compare the look of Uncharted 2 to Iron Chef, that's not fair to the production team behind kitchen stadium. I guess I'm just saying Uncharted 2 is gorgeous and one of the best looking video games I've ever seen. Oh, and it's fun as hell to play too.

Image credit: qisur

Lord Byron said about card games that "one can game ten times longer than one can do anything else." But what could card games do in the planning of online services?

Cards, if not really in a game-like manner, have been used to help plan the information architecture for websites for a long time. The exercise known as card sorting involves potential users sorting cards representing the content on the site into groups that make the most sense to them. The results of the exercise can then be used as the basis of the sitemap, or to test the effectiveness of the navigation structure of an existing site.

But with the rapid emerge of social tools, user experience designers have started to develop card games for planning entire digital products.

A couple weeks ago at the Idea09 conference, a gathering of information architects, social media strategists and user experience designers in Toronto, conference-goers gathered to play Social Mania, a game developed by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, both long-time UXD experts who have worked together at Yahoo!

In the game, people work in teams to develop a digital product around an object for a specific audience delivered in a specific way. There are cards that represent different demographics, and others that represent social objects and delivery tactics with a "plus" score for all of them, and cards that represent risks or anti-social patterns with a "minus" score.

The game is still in beta testing and, having played it myself at the conference, still needs work to make the rules easier to follow. But it's a fun idea that has potential to become a real, effective tool for planning.

Fun idea are also these Mental Notes cards. They're a set of cards that bring together 50 insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of websites and software applications. Like the Social Mania game, the Mental Notes cards are currently in development and should be out and available to UX designers and everyone else interested in spring 2010.

Karri Ojanen

Have you heard of Layer Tennis? In short it's two creatives going head to head in battle of skills. The match involves both combatants swapping a single file back & forth in realtime with 15 minutes to complete their "volley". After each volley, commentary is provided by an independent 3rd party. Winners are determined by voting via Twitter by including the #LYT hastah + the contestant of choice.

Friday's match featured Shaun Inman vs. Aaron Scamihorn, and was won by Shaun Inman with his final "volley": Sheep Not Found aka Layer 10. If you're interested the semi-finals are scheduled to kick off tomorrow, June 26th, and the finals will be on July 10th.

Very fun to follow along. Also - as an FYI, Layer Tennis is sponsored by Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Patrick Dunphy

Got that new "C-O-M-C-A-S-T" song stuck in your head?  The catchy indie-folk tune is the only audio in a new Comcast TV spot about all the cool stuff you can do via their Triple-Play service package.  In the TV spot, people sing the song as they move around diagonally on a beautifully rendered isometric grid.

Online, the recently launched "ComcastTown" site keeps the song as a looping background track while giving you a bank account and a library of furnishings to decorate your own apartment and share it with your friends via Facebook and email.

I quickly and easily decorated my "studio" with furniture, brick walls, a faux-panda rug, a couple of turntables and a "maneki neko" lucky cat statue. One thing I found annoying was its auto-notify feature telling my Facebook network as I added each item. Overall, though, I was very happy with my decorating results and the ease of use selecting items and moving them around the isometric sandbox.

IMHO this site is a great way for Comcast to show how it can play a central role as a digital media provider/connector in customers' homes, while reiterating its Triple Play offering. The charming illustrations of the town and room furnishings go a long way to put a soft touch on this branded experience. The seamless Facebook integration also helps to make this socially entertaining and ensures a wide reach.

Jay Bain

When I went to Wired's Next Fest last October, I had the opportunity to play an upcoming game for PlayStation 3 called Flower created by ThatGameCompany. Instead of killing people, monsters, or zombies like the Top 10 Games of 2008, Flower is about roaming in a dream like environment, and helping flowers to bloom.

Each level takes place in a different flower's dream. The goal of the game is to guide the petal into other vivid color flowers in this never ending field, triggering more flower spreading around in this world. During my 10 minutes with the game, there were no instruction anywhere to teach me how to play, but as a "professional button presser", I quickly learned how to control it by tilting the controller to move around the scene. The sublime movement made me feel like I was just a gust of wind. The more petals you collect, the more sounds samples you will reveal to create a beautiful melody. It's not only visually stimulating, it interacts with sound, making you feel relaxed and calm... which you don't often feel playing a video game.

Jenova Chen described Flower as a video game version of a poem. It sounds a bit abstract, but I'm looking forward to see how the game developers can take this "interactive art form" to the next level.

Euphenia Cheng

When YouTube added video annotations back in June 2008, the result was a slew of Pop-Up Video style entries and generally annoying commentary. The most interesting examples that really took advantage of the medium were a few Choose Your Own Adventure storylines and bad card tricks. But in the past month, YouTube video "games" have started appearing on the site. Above is a simple but addictive Oscar Photo Hunt and below is fairly ambitious Street Fighter game (thanks Eric Diem). Enjoy!

Marta Strickland

I'm not an avid baseball fan but I do enjoy partaking in my boyfriend's Yankee season tickets a few times a year. Recently, an announcement on the NY Post about changes to Yankee stadium caught my attention:

"Instant replays and a variety of camera angles will soon be accessible via cellphone, and fans may even be able to dial up hot dogs and beer, team officials announced yesterday." NY Post

I'm a little bit torn. On one hand, it seems that it will take away from the classic "experience" of the game. There's something about baseball that makes you think of a father/son enjoying some bonding time, hot dogs and waving giant foam fingers. But on the other hand, the experience is already so far from that with $10 beers, overweight men with the team's name spelled out on their stomachs and homerun balls selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Sporting events, especially baseball games (perhaps because of the America's Pastime references), feel like large social gatherings. Thousands of people coming together to share the experience of rooting for their team. There's a collective feeling of "we". This technology makes it more about the "me". People will spend more time staring at their phones and seatbacks instead of high-fiving the strangers around them after a stellar play.

I'd like to see them take this technology even further. Interactive games that folks can play against one another on the large stadium screens, creating/voting on songs/playlists, posting photos they take at the stadium for all to see... make it a "Personalized We" experience.

Tracy Richards

Video games are becoming more and more Web 2.0 (and beyond) every day. With recent releases like Little Big Planet, it's pretty clear that we can expect more and more social networking functionality to be used by the video game industries.

For example, Microsoft is releasing its new Dashboard for the Xbox 360 in mid-November which will allow people do to all kinds of amazing things together. You will be able to create your own avatar (much like the "Mii" for Nintendo Wii), but you will be able to take this avatar into a virtual 'party room' where you will be able to verbally communicate with your friends via Xbox Live.

Instead of only communicating, Microsoft is going one step further. They have partnered with Netflix to incorporate their streaming movie service into Xbox Live. This will allow one person in the party to select and start streaming a movie, which all people in the party room can watch, while communicating with each other in real time. Basically, it's a virtual, multi-person movie theatre.

I've been playing video games since I could walk, I can't wait to see what they do next!

Daryl Brewer

There have been several stories on the incredible use of virtual media by the Obama campaign. All their campaign events have been streamed live on his site, they use Twitter to keep people informed about them, they launched their own iPhone application - and they're not done yet. The Obama campaign is now advertising in a very popular video game for the Xbox 360.

The game, called "Burnout: Paradise", features an open world which you drive, race, trick, and crash your way through in any way you see fit (you can get details about the game here). It features billboards (a lot of which you can crash through) that companies are able to buy advertising on, just like real billboards (In fact, I believe Dodge has already done it for this game). This in itself represents an incredible way of reaching an audience of millions of (generally) younger people.

Here is a screenshot taken by an Xbox 360 gamer of the billboard which the Obama campaign has paid for. At first, most people didn't believe it; they thought it was somebody's clever Photoshop job. But then Electronic Arts (the makers of the game) confirmed that the Obama campaign has indeed paid for advertising within the game. Brilliant.

In-game advertising is not a new concept, but for a political campaign to be savvy enough to realize this opportunity exists and take advantage of it is really impressive. I really believe as video games continue to move to take advantage of the power of social networking, this is the type of advertising we will see a LOT more of. And therein lies a tremendous opportunity for Organic.

The challenges for this type of advertising will be game-specific - how can advertising be blended in without having it stick out like a sore thumb? Gamers are very, very passionate about their hobby, and while they will instinctively reject a really obvious marketing ploy, they will also applaud those that are done in a clever yet non-intrusive manner. Sounds like a heck of a fun project to me!

As in-game advertising opportunities continue to grow (and they will!), I think we will see a lot of VERY cool opportunities to show off our Exceptional Experience abilities.

You can read about this story right here.

Daryl Brewer