Advertising through Games & Social Commerce
For the last few weeks, I have been very much occupied during my weekends in trying to build my Farm and my Mafia gang. Before you start wondering about my spare time activities, let me reassure you that I’m actually referring to two of the hottest games on Facebook from a company called Zynga. The games being referred to here are “FarmVille” & “Mafia Wars”.
This led to the question - Would games from Retailers or CPG companies be an effective tool for social marketing and gathering customer feedback on new products & initiatives?
There are certainly some interesting pros to this thought. According to these statistics from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA): http://www.theesa.com/facts/salesandgenre.asp - Family Entertainment games account for around 19% of the $11.7 Billion revenue in gaming generated annually.
In-Game advertising is estimated to go up to $1 billion by 2010. As per this ESA link, http://www.theesa.com/gamesindailylife/advertising.asp, companies like Mazda & Nissan have rolled out sample car models in games like “Gran Turismo” & “NFS: Undercover” even before the actual cars are rolled out to the public.
Retailers & CPG companies can use these games to soft-launch their new products and gauge market responses. Also, given the successful penetration of mobile apps such as the ones running on iPhones, it would definitely save a lot of money which they would otherwise spend in generating market awareness and in other campaigns.
I can imagine that I would be very interested in playing a game wherein I try to build a store or a supermarket or a restaurant and try to sell food products, beverages and beer. Imagine the scope (and challenge) of trying to virtually launch or sell a chocolate for example with lavender in it to your group of friends on Facebook. Add in the complexity of actually having deliveries done from your local farm – Even FarmVille to your virtual store, we have the entire Retail, CPG & Logistics area covered.
For the more serious gamer/social networker, there are also virtual world playgrounds which are offered by the likes of “Second Life” developed by Linden Lab. However, as per this Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life there may be issues in marketing products via second life due to issues with accuracy of statistics. I personally believe that this is more due to the issues in their technical systems and not in the concept as such. If there are systems which will give the right analytics with the necessary audits and controls, the data will be trustworthy.
The other aspect however which needs thinking in the case of “Second Life” is that users will need to install a separate client on their computers before they are able to enter the virtual world. I did install the client to check it out, but then realized that I would rather use a browser than running a separate client all the time as I use multiple PC’s.
So, do you think it would work if retailers or CPG companies use this gaming medium and would you be willing to play along?
