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As digital marketing is integrating new technologies, formats do not stop evolving… and advergaming is a great example of this. Although it has been years between us, this type of advertising has penetrated among companies, as more and more brands are betting on it. We tell you what advergaming is, advantages and examples.
What is advergaming?
The Advergaming is an advertising technique that relies on advertising brands through video games, with the aim of generating awareness and enhancing engagement.
Games developed as part of an advergaming strategy are usually free and distributed online and compatible with different devices. The protagonist of them is the brand, company, product, institution or service that you want to promote.
It is necessary to distinguish the advertising inserted inside a video game, for example, the banners inside the stadiums of sports video games. In advergaming, the brand presence is not secondary, but constitutes the core of the game.
Advantages of advergaming
- It offers a non-intrusive way to connect with the public. The user himself is the one who goes to the game and interacts voluntarily with him.
- It is easy to customize. When designing a video game from scratch (or adapting an existing mechanic), the brand can include its style and values to create a unique and representative product.
- It is easily viralized. The games are very addictive and entertaining, and have a social component (you just have to see the success of Candy Crush on Facebook!). Therefore, there is a good chance that users will share them.
- It is easily measurable. We can record all user interactions with the game, such as the time they spend playing, the number of times they enter or the screen they leave.
3 famous examples of advergaming
1) Volkswagen polowers.
A campaign aimed at making users talk about the Volkswagen Polo on Twitter, especially focused on the youngest. To achieve this, they organized a game through the hashtag #Polowers, a kind of virtual race in which progress was made based on tweets. How could it be otherwise, the prize for the winner was a brand new car.
2) Magnum.
This Unilever brand managed to attract no less than 7 million people with a game based on helping the protagonist to collect chocolates on popular sites on and off the internet: a safari, New York, Italy, Spotify, YouTube… A simple premise, but that managed to hook its audience.
3) M & Ms.
This brand has taken advantage of a “lifelong” game like Conecta 3 to develop its own brand advergaming. The objective was to place a minimum of 3 M & Ms equal together so that they were eliminated: a classic, but addictive and effective game system. In addition, they also created their own adventure video game for PlayStation, M & Ms: Shell Shocked, with more than 20 levels and that could be downloaded for free.
Benefits of Advergaming
As you can imagine performing this type of action brings many benefits for the advertiser who puts his brand within reach of the consumer in a fun way.
It is an excellent way to perform content marketing
Content marketing tries to offer our users relevant content for them, so making known one of our products or several can be a success through a well-designed video game. Of course for this technique to be included in this type of marketing there must be a preliminary study of our consumers and determine if the technique is attractive to them.
Virality
These video games are still a way of doing digital marketing, since they materialize in mostly mobile environments or in web environments, so we have many possibilities that the appropriate conditions are generated for our videogame to become viral.
We enter the mind of the consumer
We get what all brands want, that they know us and we even get the affection of the user since he is not aware of being receiving publicity because he is having fun. We can offer information about product features, coupons and exclusive offers, gifts, etc … The game – reward system stimulates the impulse to buy.
Wide diversity of content
We can make a video game based on any concept and following any genre, while maintaining consistency with the brand. For example, if after a study of the interests and tastes of our target audience we determine that a high percentage are sports fans we can opt for a more sporty video game style.
This is one of the best forms of advertising to capture the attention of the consumer and achieve a lasting relationship with him. An ad lasts on average 20 seconds while advergaming can remain present for weeks. In addition, the game options are endless, introduces role models, arcade, platforms, races … As always the limit is creativity.
Advergaming, therefore, today constitutes a strategy for the future. A new advertising concept and a new way for our target to experience things within the brand’s universe, since it has voluntarily exposed itself to it. Something, on the other hand, difficult to achieve.
