By Steve Peterson

For game marketers, E3 is a vast research laboratory of marketing techniques, where you can learn what works and what doesn’t — and someone else has paid for it all. With that in mind, a walk through the halls of E3 can be a great way to see and evaluate different marketing techniques to see how you might use them as inspiration — or as something to avoid.

Let’s start with booth design, since that’s one of the first things you’ll notice. Check out the hot titles at the big booths — is there a traffic jam That’s a sign of poor booth design. Sure, all the booths will get clogged with people sometimes, but when it spills into the aisles it becomes counter-productive. People start avoiding a booth altogether if it’s not possible to walk by… and the company is losing impressions that it paid a lot of money to get.

Aside from the sheer logistics of the booth, does it make sense? Can you easily grasp the focal point Is it absolutely clear what’s most important to the company? It should be… and what’s the message you’re getting? Does it match what is being said in flyers, or what the booth personnel are saying? The booth is the opportunity to drive home the most important products and selling points. Too often booths become confused with competitive messages and distracting visuals everywhere. Make a note which booths work best, and why — and which booths don’t work for you, and why they don’t.

Is it hard or easy to find the games you’re interested in Even if you can’t get hands-on due to the crowd, can you watch the game play easily without standing on someone’s head?

Booth personnel are a critical part of a booth’s success. Is it obvious who the booth personnel are? It should be. Are they helpful and friendly? Again, they should be. Sometimes companies will just throw developers onto the show floor with little or no training or preparation, which can hurt how games are perceived. Oh, and a note on the dress code: It should be professional. As for booth babes (or boys) in scanty costumes, that’s a sure sign the company lacks confidence in the quality of the game. (Or that execs in charge of the booth are insensitive to the brand message this puts out.)

Collateral materials, whether digital or physical, are an important component for driving home marketing messages and increasing their reach, both in time and in space. Videos will no doubt be posted in huge numbers next week; who’s getting all the views Are there some interesting items being given out at the booth (Last year the Oswald ears at the Disney booth garnered huge interest.) It’s one thing to attract attention at E3; it’s entirely another to capture the imagination of gamers around the world. Pay close attention to the videos or other collateral that are drawing the most buzz, and you’re halfway to being able to do that for your products.

Events are another E3 marketing mainstay that you should pay attention to. Many companies like to drag in celebrities of one sort or another, but that doesn’t always guarantee an impact. How well is an event staged Is there a crowd Are people engaging with the product, or just with the celebrity It can be a difficult task to shift the spotlight from a celeb to your game; is the celebrity helping or hindering?

Keep in mind that all of this marketing activity should ultimately be designed to sell more games. Metrics like social media impact, or measurements of buzz are all well and good — but investors and owners need to see that the income ends up being greater than the outgo. These games have to generate money, not just attention. Marketing needs to translate attention into action — which is to say, money. Maybe the game caught your eye, but did you walk away wanting to buy it?

Finally, let’s not forget that the marketing can only do so much; in the end the game has to sell on its own merits. Last year’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter got a terrific marketing treatment by EA, but ultimately the game’s sales were disappointing. Marketing did its best, but flaws in the game kept sales from reaching its goals. With that in mind, don’t oversell a game if you plan to sell more games in the future. In the hyper-connected gamer marketplace, games can’t hide any flaws.