Our VOD (video of the day) series kicks off with Petri over at Kloonigames showing us the true meaning of transparency. This time lapse video documents the seven days he spent creating a prototype version of his game, Post I.T. Shooter:
Definitely one to pass along.[Download the game at Kloonigames]
Interesting article over at RWJF by Nedra Weinreich discussing the merits and challenges of marketing health-focused video games, and what we have learned over the past couple of years.
From the article:
The way health games should be framed depends on to whom you are talking. For health professionals and funders, positive research results are the key. Focus on the games as an intervention that has demonstrated success (and work hard to accumulate the hard evidence to back up your claims). Parents and teachers will respond best to an emphasis on learning and skills building that will serve to help the kids stay healthy as they navigate through life. For kids? It’s got to be all about fun. If it’s not fun, the game needs at least to be interesting enough to capture their attention.
But what makes this new wave of health games, including recent pushes by EA and Ubisoft, any different from the Dance Dance Revolution fad that tried to sweep gym classes across the country just a couple of years ago? Nedra says it best:
And game producers will be concerned with one thing: are games for health marketable The Wii and Wii Fit have been game-changers (pardon the pun) in their popularity and may open up many more doors in this direction.
Nintendo has definitely busted the door wide open and, instead of going for the kids alone, they’ve made undoubted strides in marketing to the real core consumer in this area – and those are the consumers who will get more penetration in places like those school gyms.
What do you think? Is this just another fad, or will we see some real, consistent adoption in the coming years.
[Full article at RWJF Blogs] {link no longer active}
Forbes recently interviewed Outsell, Inc. chief executive Anthea Stratigos about the research firm’s analysis that $65 million could move away from traditional marketing and back into company websites and Internet efforts. A few highlights:
[Stratigos] The marketing dollars companies now spend on their own sites is equivalent to all TV ad revenue for the year. Eight years ago we said that the Global 2000 would be the dot-coms of tomorrow. That’s what’s playing out.
She also agrees with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who recently said global advertising budgets aren’t in a recession, but a complete “reset,” and they will not come back to their original levels.
[Stratigos] Advertising which has left the news industries, for example, is not going to come back in its same shape or form. But you can still make a case for cross-media buys and the combination of display ads plus search optimization as being effective.
The entire interview is a quick read and worthy of a few minutes, especially if you need some reassurance that Internet advertising isn’t on its way out, but may actually be the dominant force in coming years.
Josh Bernoff takes some time to analyze the ongoing push of advertising towards digital mediums, not the least of which is video games. From AdvertisingAge:
The result is that digital, which will be about 12 percent of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21 percent in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much. This is huge. It means we are all digital marketers now, since digital is at the center of many campaigns anyway.
The signs have been there for quite awhile, and companies like EA have been at the forefront of taking advantage of the increased engagement clients are seeing with audiences in virtual spaces.
Microsoft has been making significant strides as well, two of which are extremely notable.
First, if you have an Xbox 360, boot it up and see if you notice anything new on the dashboard. Chances are there’s an embedded video playing alongside some of the featured game slots as soon as you log into Xbox Live. These are extremely eye-catching, and most of them have ties to digital downloads (games, themes, contests) that offer additional chances at engagement.
Secondly, 1 vs. 100 is a game, currently in beta, that has Xbox 360 players answering trivia questions in a visually appealing game show presentation, complete with their avatar as one of the stars of the show. The best part for potential clients? Those commercial breaks that occur every several questions, with tens of thousands of gamers happy (enough) to watch them in exchange for the free game.
We’ll keep you posted as this develops, and we’re very curious to see how Sprint and Honda are enjoying their 1 vs. 100 advertising at the gaming forefront of this advertising push to digital.
Twitter is all the rage, but plenty of naysayers are hopping on the Twitter backlash, questioning the benefits marketers receive from being on the microblogging platform. You may want to turn their attention to a recent article in SearchEngineLand which shows Twitter could be underreported in Google Analytics data by as much as 1600 percent.
From SearchEngineLand:
“Based only on referrers, at best, Google or any analytics program would have said Twitter sent two visits. But because I used tracking codes, I was able to overcome the lack of referring data and see that Twitter (itself or via applications or web sites using Twitter data) sent nine visits. That means analytics packages might be undercounting Twitter visits by nearly 500 percent.”
“Meanwhile, Bit.ly was showing those 58 clicks to the page. Let’s say it wasn’t filtering out some of the robots. I can still see that there are 32 visits that the log files recorded, all with the tracking codes that never existed until I tweeted the link with them. So those are all Twitter-derived visits. That means an undercount by a standard analytics tool depending on referrer data by 1600 percent.”
SearchEngineLand has already pinged Google to find out what they’re doing about the problem, and outlines several ways to prevent the undercounting from affecting your referral stats.
