Is it enough to treat advergames as just a way to get an advert for your product, brand or service placed on other websites and in front of their visitors. Can you get away with spending as little as possible on your custom advergame, or is it necessary to allocate a larger budget in order to get good results?
Many marketers seem to believe that all advergames are built the same and take some convincing of the merits of spending more than the bare minimum on their custom advergame. The problem is, having a minimal web based interactive widget built and trying to pass it off as a game rarely works. By choosing to use advergames in your marketing strategy, you're choosing to advertise your product to the casual gaming community. If you're not offering something genuinely worthwhile then they're unlikely to take much notice. Going down this route will give you a minimal chance of success and may mean that a chunk of your marketing budget has been wasted.
Two main factors can make or break any advergame:
1) Is your game worthwhile to the online gaming community?
Any successful advergame will grab your audiences attention, keep it for as long as possible and make them want to return again and again. The better you can accomplish this goal, the more time will be spent viewing and interacting with your brand. To do this you must create a great, immersive interactive experience for players. The more the game sucks them in the better the results will be for your business.
2) Will websites want to feature your game?
In order to get your advergame in front of the biggest audience possible it needs to get featured on the websites they visit. It's essential that your advergame spreads as widely as possible amongst gaming community websites, games portals and blogs, if not you'll be left with a game that hardly anyone sees or plays. So you need to give them great content for their websites. If your game is rubbish, it's unlikely to get picked up by many of these websites, if this happens it will dramatically reduce the size of your audience. In order to maximize play numbers you need as many sites as possible either hosting your advergame themselves or linking to the game on your website. The better the game, the more buzz it will generate, the wider it will spread and ultimately the more exposure and web traffic it will generate for you.
It's extremely important that you think in terms of providing a great game for free, first and foremost, when using advergames as part of your marketing strategy. Although the tendency is to think of it from a purely functional advertising point-of-view, this can actually make the advertising within the game less effective. The more emphasis you put on providing a great, immersive interactive experience for players the greater the rewards will be for your business. Unfortunately, this means spending more than the absolute bare minimum in most cases. A great game in it's own right will provide much greater engagement with your audience, increased brand awareness and much greater web traffic to your website or online store.
Author Resource:
Simon Walklate is a partner in Bristol, UK based Flash game development specialists The Motion Monkey who specialise in advergaming .
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