Advertisers Play on Allure of Online Games
Become a famous disc jockey! Collect and mix records! Fight off sketchy dudes! Scratch some vinyl and make the bad guys dance!
These are the objectives of an online video game called “DJ Fu Wax Attack.”
Or are they?
As players climb their way to the top of the renegade music business, they skate past billboard after billboard touting Ford Motor Co.
Ads disguised as games are the rage among online marketers desperate to grab the attention of Internet surfers who have grown all but numb to banner ads. Tapping into the popularity of online games, companies such as Pepsi-Cola Co., Lego Co., Levi Strauss & Co. and DaimlerChrysler are seeding the Web with simple but addictive games to boost their brands--and furtively collect data on potential customers.
These so-called advergames blur the distinction between entertainment and advertising in hopes that impatient Web audiences can be drawn in long enough for marketers to deliver their messages.
“It’s all about building the relationship, the dialogue with consumers,” said Jim Stone, senior Internet market manager for Levi’s, which launched a game site, now at https://www.lostchange.com, to promote its Silver Tab denim line.
The use of games by mainstream advertisers, however, has cropped up only in recent months. No one is certain they actually work. But because the games are relatively cheap to make and maintain, they are a safe experiment even for cost-conscious companies.
“In our minds, this is a research exercise, and our spending on this is capped accordingly,” said Scott Grant, national advertising manager for Toyota Motor Sales USA, which is spending less than 1% of its marketing and advertising budget on games. “Time will tell whether this will have the ability to connect with consumers and show tangible results on an ongoing and sustainable basis.”
Meanwhile, Toyota is continuing to dabble with games, including three racing games developed by WildTangent Inc. and hosted on Zone.com, a site run by Microsoft Corp. More than 400,000 people downloaded one called “Tacoma Adrenaline.”
“Online games are one of the most popular activities on the Internet today,” said Alex St. John, chief executive of WildTangent, which also produces games marketing movies and television and radio shows, including the Howard Stern show. “Many of the top sites on the Internet consistently are game sites.”
Advertisers Like the Interactivity
For marketers, the allure of games is their interactivity. Billboards and banners don’t require people to act, but games demand attention.
“The thing I find compelling about the Internet is its interactive capability,” said Torrey Galida, vice president of marketing at Ford Canada. “We were supposed to get that with banner ads, but so few people actually clicked on those ads that it became difficult for us to rationalize further spending on them. Games, on the other hand, get people involved.”
In one of Ford’s campaigns, the company contracted with YaYa, a Los Angeles game company, to develop a racing game that players can e-mail to one another. Ford sent the game to 13,000 people, and 42% clicked on it. Of those, 8% forwarded it to an average of three friends, allowing Ford to expand its e-mail list.
E-mail addresses are just one example of the information companies can collect. Games can offer prizes, prompting players to register contact information. Names and addresses can be matched to credit records to gather income and other data. In addition, game players can be used as virtual focus groups, answering surveys and making choices that reveal their preferences.
“The cool thing is that while people play, we can learn about them,” said Daryl Pitts, director of production at YaYa. “We can track what color car they choose, what model, how long they play. You can get very detailed information.”
Though there’s no proof that games lead to increased sales, anecdotal evidence suggests that games can engage consumers far longer than most forms of advertising.
A good print ad might keep a consumer focused for five or 10 seconds, but the average visitor spent 10 minutes at https://www.lostchange .com, said Levi’s Stone.
Another game site, Candystand.com, operated by LifeSavers Co., has become one of the stickiest entertainment sites on the Web. In May, it drew more than 1 million unique visitors, who spent an average of 37 minutes on the site, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.
Since Lego relaunched its site in September to include games and stories, the number of visitors has shot up 500% and the average time each person spends on the site has tripled.
“It drives online visit time,” said Brad Justus, senior vice president of Lego. “Games are a good way of getting people’s attention, keeping them involved. The amount of time people spend on the site has been driven markedly upward as we expand the games. Our site isn’t a product catalog. It’s where you can go to have fun.”
Because games are particularly attractive to children, companies must take extra care not to run afoul of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which requires Web sites to obtain parental consent before collecting, using or disclosing personal information about children younger than 13.
The larger concern for children’s advocates, though, is the constant advertising bombardment of kids.
“Obviously they’re using games to lure the kids onto the site so they are surrounded by all this advertising,” said Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Center for Media Education in Washington. “On TV, there has been a tradition of separating the advertising and content. Online, there are no such rules.”
“We’ve never had a medium like this, so this is a testing ground for setting our digital culture,” Montgomery said. “We’re in danger of over-commercializing our children.”
But games aren’t just for kids. Online gamers can run the demographic gamut, said Chris Di Cesar, group product manager at Microsoft’s Zone.com, which gets 80% of its revenue from advergames. Half the players on the Zone are female, and 71% of its 22 million registered users are between 25 and 54.
“Everyone plays games,” said Elaine Chen, director of strategy for Kpe, an online marketing firm in New York. But not everyone plays the same game. Women prefer strategy and puzzle games, and men prefer competitive action games, Chen said. Younger players like music and action games, and older folks play familiar card and trivia games.
VirtualGiveAway, a San Francisco developer, makes games for such diverse clients as BBCAmerica.com and Samsung Electronics Co. Both companies target adult consumers. Games on the BBCAmerica Web site involve trivia that requires players to keep abreast of current events. The Samsung game is designed to inform customers about its video monitors by giving one away every month to a user selected at random from players who complete a puzzle of the company logo.
Territory Uncharted but Not All That Risky
Although games may be sprouting all over the Web peddling everything from movies to sneakers, spending on advergames remains minuscule, partly because companies are hesitant to sink too much into an unproven medium.
It’s also because games are cheap to make. Like a car with a new body, games can be “reskinned” to look like an entirely different product, said Chris Kantrowitz, founder of Groove Alliance, a software developer in Los Angeles. The process can cost as little as several thousand dollars, he said.
Kantrowitz demonstrated the point with one game a single developer has redesigned into four different titles, including a snowboarding game, a skateboarding game, a turkey adventure game and a snow sliding game. The games can be purchased outright for less than $50,000 or licensed by companies that pay a monthly fee to sponsor the game on sites such as Shockwave or Zone.
Companies can pay upward of $400,000 to build an original game from scratch, but so far few have.
Still, the cost of producing and running a game is small change compared with traditional media buys.
“It’s not as if we’re producing [the equivalent of] a 30-second commercial,” said John Vail, director of digital media marketing for Pepsi, whose site, Pepsiworld, is loaded with games ranging from simple races to complex baseball games.
As as with any creative product, some games take off and others fizzle. Indeed, many online advergames are repetitive and rapidly become tiresome.
“A lot of the advergames are done by advertising companies that know little about making games,” said Billy Pidgeon, a game industry analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix in New York. “Even for casual gamers, it still has to have production value and good game play.”
It remains to be seen whether games, no matter how addictive, are worthwhile. And because the practice is so new, few statistics exist to help quantify its effectiveness.
“It’s still unclear what the value of this is,” said Marissa Gluck, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter. “Is there higher brand recall? . . . Does it increase sales? I don’t think anyone’s even attempted to answer that yet.”
Grant, Toyota’s advertising manager, acknowledged that he is in uncharted territory.
“It’s very hard to know” what the impact is, Grant said. “I do know that in this fragmented media environment, we need to have multiple stakes in the fire. You ignore any one medium at your peril. From a strategic standpoint, we need to learn what this medium can do for us. In the meantime, we’ve generated something fun and creative.”
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Advertising Games
So-called advergames often are cheaper than other forms of advertising, but they have not been thoroughly tested.
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Production Placement Type of ad cost cost 30 seconds on “The X-Files”* $250,000 minimum $265,000 Full page in Sports Illustrated 200,000 203,000 Full page in Rolling Stone 200,000 103,455 Full page in Vanity Fair 200,000 97,210 Nascar sponsorship N/A 100,000 to 10 million Online advergame** 30,000 to 50,000 5,000 Banner campaign on Yahoo 5,000 to 20,000 Varies
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* Estimate as of October 2000
** Production cost is for adding advertising elements to existing games. The cost for creating an original game can be much higher. Placement cost is estimated monthly Internet hosting fee.
Sources: Advertising Age, YaYa, Groove Alliance, Times research
