Guest comment: Viral's still worth taking seriously

There's no question that with the dreaded credit crunch biting, marketers are starting to tighten their belts just like the rest of us. But they still need to get their message out there to their target audience and advergaming is one of the most cost-effective ways to do that.

Sadly, due to some seriously low quality games flooding the market (you know who you are!); it seems that there's still some cynicism about the power of advergaming. But think about it…

What better way to get consumers engaging and interacting with your brand than an absorbing, fun game? Quite simply, people like playing games – that's why they buy an Xbox or Wii. So if you can give them simple, but crackingly addictive games for free, then it's win-win.

And because they've chosen to play the game, you're more likely to create a positive interaction with them, which as a result, means they'll be more likely to click through to wherever you're pointing them; have a greater propensity to buy your brand in the future; and they're more likely to give you valuable information about themselves in exchange for a voucher or competition entry. It's a quid pro quo situation.

A good advergame needs to be easy to play, but a challenge to master. The problem is, a lot of advergames out there are actually rubbish to play and there's nothing to master! If a game's rewarding and there's a sense of achievement, you're halfway there to hooking in your potential customers. So, beware of the agencies that charge £5-10k for a "viral" game and talk you into believing that they've got a game that will go "viral". It's just not that simple. Just because it's a game, it's not necessarily viral.

Another major benefit of advergames is the way the Flash content is "stripped out" and posted on hundreds, even thousands of websites. So you can create an engaging game, but sitting within that Flash content is a product/service microsite, (See www.jellyjumper.com as a good example) that gets your brand out to a massive audience.

But if you're a UK company, there's really no point in getting teenagers in Rio playing your game. You need to go after the right people in the right country. This is where clever seeding is crucial. If the game idea itself is well targeted and your seeding is spent in the right areas, there's no reason why you can't hit the relevant target audiences.

Using seeding companies like Viralnet, means you can guarantee, yup guarantee, players within your target geographic region. In fact, you can be looking at guaranteeing several hundred thousand players - and that's before the viral spread takes over.

Recently for one client, through three advergames, we added over 250,000 new opt-ins to their e-mail database and increased sales by an impressive 15%. You can't argue with that..Advergaming works

So marketers should take a good look at their digital budgets - with £50,000 or so they could be engaging and entertaining impressive numbers of current and potential customers and starting a rewarding customer relationship with them.

By Oli Christie

Creative Director

Inbox

www.inbox.co.uk