Gamification ist eines der relativ neuen Buzzwords seit etwas mehr als einem Jahr. Sebastian Deterding hat auf der letzten re:publica am 14. April 2011 einen spannenden Vortrag darüber gehalten, den ich bisher noch nicht gebloggt habe. Hier ist er:

Ein Thema, das im Marketing immer relvanter wird. Aufgrund der interaktionsmöglichkeiten im Web und über mobile Endgeräte können in Zukunft immer ausgefeiltere Marketingmechanismen auf Basis von Spielemechanismen ins Leben gerufen werden.

Es gibt bereits einige Marketingprogramme, die Spielemechaniken verwenden. Eines der besten, bzw. bekanntesten Beispiele ist nach wie vor Lufthansa Miles&More (bzw. vergleichbare Programme). Es enthält relativ viele gamifizierte Komponenten:

• Es geht natürlich um’s Punkte / Meilen sammeln
• Wenn man eine normale Miles&More Karte hat, verfallen jedes Jahr die älstesten Punkte
• Die Meilen die man sammeln kann sind unterschiedlich, wenn man eine M&M Krediktkarte hat: für Einkäufe gibt es Prämienmeilen, für Flüge Statusmeilen
• Diese Meilen tragen unterschiedlich zum Status bei
• Es gibt mehrere Stati: Normal, Frequent Traveller, Senator, Hons
• Jeder dieser Statis genießt verschiedene Benefits

Dieses “Spiel” hat  einen großen Teil von Frequent Travellern in seinen Bann gezogen. Man hört immer wieder Storys von Leuten, die kurz vor der Schwelle zum Senator oder Hons geradezu merkwürdige Verrenkungen unternehmen, um möglichst viele Meilen zusammeln.

Was für Marketing Programme werden in Zukunft noch entstehen, je mehr sich der Gedanke durchsetzt, dass man mit der Gamifizierung von Marketingaktionen ein hohes Involvement und hohe Bindung schaffen kann?

It’s not so much about making things playful so they’re generally more fun, but to design motivation experiences.

Just: how effective is it? here is a nice presentation about this:

Now there is a campaign for the Swedish Post called “Sweden’s safest hands”. Using your iPhone, it’s your task to safely deliver virtual parcels around the city:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nice idea, but I really wonder, how these campaigns deliver in terms of actual KPI. As playful and involving as they might be – they seem to be very complicated for reaching a large audience.

It probably wasn’t the intention in the first place. Yet somehow I get the feeling that the viral spread of the case videos are the main objective of the communication strategy…

Nevertheless, I like the playful, gamification aspects of both cases!

Fascinating in terms of selection of sites and interaction with these sites. Not very sticking, though. Once you have visited a few sites, it does get a little boring, since the game play is not very special.

Just wondering: did they really get permission from all those brands to use their site-screenshots in a game? Respect to the account manager arranging all these deals.

Try it yourself: the Magnum Site-to-Site Travel Game.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the facebook page you can play a simple game, trying to flick chips yourself.

A nice try to prolong the story from the TVC. Yet, the game is a little to simple to be really fun…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can even drive it in Hamburg. Also, it displays the correct time of the day, when at night, like now, the map is darker and the mini has its headlights switched on. Since it is on facebook, you can apparently also challenge your friends in a race (I haven’t tried that myself yet).

Seth Priebatsch argues, that it could be a game layer that will be put on top of future marketing programmes. See for yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The reason I find this particularly interesting is the fact, that in the last few years, advertising and marketing has adopted the trend of alternate reality gaming and transmedia storytelling, but many agencies don’t yet grasp the risks associated with this kind of disguise of campaigns.

Ever so often you get an idea from creative along the lines of: “we get this actor to pretend he is actually Mr. Smith, seriously involved in xyz, then we create a website for him, a fake facebook profile, (…) only to reveal that this is part of a campaign for brand X after two weeks of the actor having interacted with (=deceived) his fans, friends, followers, etc.

A typical campaign with a mystery phase. There have been some in the past, but it’s not state of the art any more, really. People want storytelling to be authentic, at the same time they want to be able to tell if it’s real:

Phillips followed this short discussion with the suggestion that people do not like to be “fooled” – they themselves want to be the ones to blur the lines between reality and fiction. The corollary is that people want to be in control of how far those lines are blurred.

So what could happen if people don’t realise it’s not real? What happens when people learn about parts of the game without realising it’s only that? Here is an example:

Phillips begins this section by introducing the case of Zona Incerta, a Brazilian ARG. Zona Incerta featured a video on YouTube in which the fictional CEO of Arkhos Biotech talks about buying the Amazon rainforests so that his company can raze a huge swath of it. Many people mistook the video as real, and word of it got around to a Brazilian senator, who then denounced Arkhos Biotechnology on the floor of the Brazilian senate. Fortunately for the makers and sponsors of Zona Incerta, the senator had a sense of humor and even suggested that Brazil honor a National ARG Day after discovering that Arkhos Biotech did not exist, and the video was part of a game.

Or consider this example:

Toyota’s “practical joke” marketing campaign for their Matrix model also backfired spectacularly after a woman sued Toyota for causing her to believe she was being stalked. In the campaign, users were able to enter information about their friends (without their knowledge or consent) and input their personal information so that they would receive phone calls, texts, and emails from “virtual lunatics.” The explanation is still posted on the marketing campaign website, and reading the text should be enough to make anyone shake their head and say, “that’s a bad, bad idea.”

This case can still be found here.
The case of Dell even shows, how such “games” can results in dangerous actions. Imagine, this situation had escalated a little more:

The case of a Dell marketing stunt ended less happily. Earlier this year, two Dell employees were arrested when one of them donned a mask and appeared on the sales floor at a Dell campus in Round Rock, Texas, waving a metal object and directing everyone to the lobby. The ill-conceived stunt was meant to move everyone to the lobby for a new product announcement but became much more complicated when the police were called.

Given these incidents (and a little bit of common sense), one shouldn’t be surprised, that authenticity and reality should be well separated:

Phillips asserted that perhaps the desire for authenticity and truth in stories has been mistaken for a desire for “reality.” We want to tell stories that are true, she stated. A story can be true, can be authentic, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be “real.”

For advertising campaigns this means: never let it be unclear, that whatever your target audience looks at or interacts with, is part of advertising.

You might place only a small hint, but you should always place a hint. Ideally, you play it loud and open – that’s called branded entertainment and quite a few brands have successfully adopted this approach. It doesn’t mean at all, that your storytelling can’t feel “authentic” at the same time. It’s just clear, that it ain’t real.

If the audience is completely left in the dark about your true intentions (i.e. promote a brand or product), you might cause some upstir as mentioned above.
You might even find it backfires on you – people will get upset if they find out you tricked them into paying attention to your advertising!

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is a page on facebook showing the current status quo of the contestants, as well as a google map for showing where the contestants are at the moment, including their supporting tweetvolume:

It let’s you checkin into Movies, Books, Shows, etc.

Somehow people got used to “checking in” to things. And they also got used to sharing experiences. Weird concept though, that you check into a book. But the social aspect is great, because (as with foursquare) you can leave tips, comments, see who also checked in to that particular medium, etc. Does this need to be a “mobile” app? Think not, as there does not seem to be any location aspect to it.

It also seems to be a cool recommendation engine. I wonder what else people will get the chance to check into? Meals, drinks? And who has the time to constantly update their checkin status for every single detail of life? I already keep forgetting to check in with foursquare all the time.

The report on the “glitch”

Tiger proving the Jesus Shot:

What I admire, is something completely different: Apparantly, these delivery men are tracked in real time with real journey data, during the regular working hours. And this is remarkable. I have also worked for clients with a huge fleet of delivery vehicles and I do appreciate the fact that Heineken managed to include their drivers into this game. Creatives usually come up easily with lots of brilliant ideas how to connect the mobile workforce of a client with a webpage via all sorts of mobile devices like phones or GPS tracking devices. But organisational reality most of the time kills these ideas.

So this won’t have been easy to push through the internal, most likely rather political, approval and commitment chain in order to get the buy in of all the different departments (marketing, distribution, logistics, etc.). Kudos, I like that.

(via)

Toyota in World of Warcraft

Click here to view the embedded video.

Coke in World of Warcraft

Click here to view the embedded video.

Coke in Secondlife

Click here to view the embedded video.

Coke in GTA:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks for the tip!

The shooting car is the central character of a new Xbox game called Yaris that Toyota will introduce today. The game will be offered free to all Xbox 360 console owners in the United States and Canada, who can download it from Xbox Live’s service. It is also the first Xbox game created by an advertiser to be distributed over Xbox Live.

They were not the first to launch such a game, but again, this is a good example of a growing trend:

Advertisers in the United States will spend $502 million on video game advertising this year, up from $346 million last year, according to eMarketer, a research firm. Just over half of that is in the form of ads placed within games, and the rest is for marketers to create their own games, known in the industry as advergames.

That this can bei highly successful is proven by Burger King for example, who sold an advergame for the Xbox for $3.5 which despite the price showed a considerable amount of time spent with the game:

Using Xbox data on game use, the Burger King game equates in time spent to more than 1.4 billion 30-second commercials, the fast-food company says.

Imagine that. 1.4 billion voluntary 30 second long contacts – It will be hard for “classical” advertising to beat that! Both in terms of quantity, as well as quality:

Interacting with our characters in the games is actually more engaging than just sitting back in your chair and watching a Super Bowl commercial,” said Russ Klein, president for global marketing for Burger King.

(On a side note: how does Microsoft track that, anyway? This is scary, once again…)

Giles Rhys Jones is also rather early: He already predicts the Digital Advertising Trends for 2008. The trends he lists are all about the changing agency landscape. And he’s right about them, I think. The way agencies will work will change (does change already). The skills needed will change, too.

Sofar, we have two sites racing for the jackpot: Kongregate and YoYo Games.

I doubt the potential is as big as for any of the other typical Web 2.0 sites, simply because it is so much more difficult to conceptualise a computer came, with all its rules, scenarios, player modes, levels, etc.

At the same time I am sure the market is still big enough for good advertising potential, since people will probably spend even more time on these online games portals than they will on Youtube.

(The only thing the sites need to make sure: that the players will see a range of ads, even though they are most likely spending a lot of time on a single page. Remember the discussion about the death of the page view?)

Click here to view the embedded video.

(found at psfk)

Funnily enough I wrote back then:

I wish second life was only nearly as realistic as anything the new cryengine can show!

Well, it looks like Entropia made the race…

The LA Times has a story about the US companies starting to have second thoughts:

“There’s not a compelling reason to stay,” said Brian McGuinness, vice president of Aloft, a brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. that is closing its Second Life shop and donating its virtual land to the nonprofit social-networking group TakingITGlobal.

But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.

The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.

On the other hand, many companies had trouble finding something of added value to present in the virtual world:

For some advertisers, the problem is that Second Life is a fantasyland, and the representations of the people who play in it don’t have human needs. Food and drink aren’t necessary, teleporting is the easiest way to get around and clothing is optional. In fact, the human form itself is optional.

Which is especially frustrating, if you’re just in it because you wanted that publicity:

most firms were more interested in the publicity they received from their ties with Second Life than in the digital world itself. “It was a way to brand themselves as being leading-edge,” he said.

I know exactly what they mean. I had quite a few clients asking us about Second Life. What it is, and what they could do in there. Some even asked, whether it actually makes sense to move in there. For some companies there is a lot they can provide in this digital world that is of added value. Some might not have the right product, but had a good idea. And some might better not move in-world in the first place.

Now some US companies that did move in with whatever approach, are reversing their strategy.

But, as this article of German Newspaper “Die Welt” says, two of the most active German companies in Second Life are still content to stay:

“Momentan bestehen keine Pläne, sich aus Second Life zurückzuziehen”, so Oliver Brüggen, Sprecher von Adidas [...] Seit der Inseleröffnung im September 2006 verkaufte Adidas monatlich 2700 Schuhpaare im Second-Life-Shop und verzeichnete im Schnitt 9000 Besucher.

(“There are currently no plans to move out of Second Life, says Oliver Brüggen of Adidas. Since opening their shop in 2006, Adidas has sold 2700 pairs of shoes per month and had around 9.000 visitors per month”)

Auch DaimlerChrysler will weiterhin mit seiner Marke Mercedes Benz in Second Life vertreten bleiben. “Wir sind sehr zufrieden mit den Besucherzahlen. Das Ziel unseres Auftritts in Second Life ist, in direkten Dialog mit der Zielgruppe zu treten”, betont Susanne Klauser

DaimlerChrysler will also stay within Second Life with their brand Mercedes Benz. “We are very satisfied with the number of visitors. The objective of our presence is to engage in a dialogue with our target audience”, emphasizes Susanne Klauser

(Translation is mine, please let me know if something is incorrect.)

I wonder just for how long they’ll stay. Because in general, the first indicators of a slowdown in user growth and activity rate are appearing:

Between May and June, the population of active avatars declined 2.5%, and the volume of U.S. money exchanged within the world fell from a high of $7.3 million in March to $6.8 million in June.

What’s should be even more concerning: users seem to be flocking on to other platforms, testing them. Since Second Life is not really the best in terms of graphics and performance, there might soon be a better offer around the corner. And users might act in a swarm like behaviour and move on to the next tree. Worlds such as Entropia Universe and There.

I just wonder, with all that hype around facebook, if it isn’t time for a facebook application that offers you the social components of facebook (especially enabling to keep you current contact list) in a 3D virtual world? Wouldn’t that be neat? And for my sake, please also include netvibes in that offer!