Today, I thought I would show you some great examples of gamification and advertising. I advise you to click on each link below and go through the videos. These are great examples of what gamification can do and how it can get people engaged. I have included 5 videos each in a different sector.
But first let me go through what gamification is and what it can do.
Games have been around for many years, even in prehistoric years we see evidence of men using games to teach their children how to live. Today, as we have firmware, software and many others, we want to introduce Funware. Funware, a term coined by Gabe Zichermann, is the use of game mechanics in non-game contexts to encourage desired user actions and generate customer loyalty and engagement. Funware typically employs game mechanics such as points, leaderboards, badges, challenges and levels.
Loyalty is:
– A way for consumers to express its preference to a brand
– A way for consumers to reimburse investment you have made in them to build a strong relationship
Engagement is a mix of several metrics such as recency, frequency, length, viral angle and notation.
For gamification to be efficient, it needs to have a social angle as well as a web analytics tool around it. First because when you win, you want to tell people, hence the social networks aspect. Then you also need to measure your campaigns and understand how they are doing.
To be able to optimize your campaign, you need to know about your target market. For that, we have identified five types of players:
– The killer – the player who want to win no matter what
– The socializer – the player who is mainly interested in playing with people
– The explorer – the player who is mainly interested in the adventure
– The implementer – the player who is combining the 3 interests from above
– The player who plays without knowing it
Once you have identified which player you want to target, you will need to work with marketing people who can deliver games or advertising tailored to your target. The videos below answer many questions in many areas. They are fun, engaging and allow you to dive into a situation that you will consider as yours. Your engagement will be very strong and from that you will build a great loyalty to your brand. This is the key of any gamification campaign: how to build a strong link between a brand and a consumer. Today gamification is becoming strong because marketers realize they can fulfill great requirements. Tomorrow, gamification will be even more powerful because millennials or G generation will only know activities around games. Some of them have learned how to read thanks to video games, all of them have been playing on tablets, phones, consoles and computers. They will expect to make decisions like they are playing games. Marketers have started to adapt but this is just the beginning, we will need to completely transform our campaigns and our ways of doing business.
First example, I would like to cover today is how to lose weight and have fun? A water brand in France called Contrex has been using gamification for the past years to help people lose weight by drinking its water. Losing weight as everybody knows is not fun. It requires sacrifices and you cannot approach it on a commercial. Even Weight Watcher struggles and tries to make it appealing, fun and engaging to lose weight but there is a long way to go for them to succeed. In this video, they show regular ladies having fun on a bike to get a computer animated man to undress (remember we are in France).
What did you think? Fun no? You will remember this commercial!
The second one follows the same principle with people in the street of Paris and getting a computer animated on fire building soaked. Coming out the building, you see sexy men in underwear. Each time you have the reward that will motivate women in this commercial to do an action.
Now let’s look at these 3 videos that will entice us to do something good for our planet, our town, our houses.
First with the world’s deepest bin:
Fun no? Did you notice the people at the end coming back to get more trash?
Now the speed camera in San Francisco (USA). People speeding will pay a fine in a pot (as always) and people following the speed limit have a chance to win the pot. This is the award. We will be getting more people to obey the law and make money at the same time. Have a look.
And finally, the scratch mat and how a shop made people use their mats when in general nobody bothered.
I could go on and on as there are many other examples to look at. One that I particularly like is the one where stairs were changed into piano keys and people going up and down the stairs would make sound. The escalator next to the stairs did not interest anyone as they all wanted to have fun on the stairs.
We can change people’s behavior by engaging them in a fun activity. Now you understand gamification, this is all…. Have FUN!
As a conclusion, we can see that adding an element of gamification in advertising is powerful and efficient.
To succeed in a gamification campaign, you need to follow these rules:
– Know your players
– Know game mechanics
– Set up a powerful analytics tool
– Put in place an award system that works
– Know legal requirements around games and mechanics
– Know brand objectives to better answer them
– Manage the online marketing levers