Branded games are being used more and more by businesses to increase brand awareness online, here’s why:

Branded games are interactive

Traditional advertising methods allow your audience to passively view your advert and nothing more. Branded games on the other hand allow them to interact with your brand. As well as making your advert more memorable, this can encourage longer view times and repeat visits.

Branded games are fun

Most forms of traditional advertising are pretty boring and don’t really engage the audience. Not so with branded games, they put the fun into advertising, creating an enjoyable experience for the viewer.

Branded games don’t have a fixed lifespan

Following production and distribution branded games can continue to work for you over the longer term, for no additional cost. They often continue to work for years after the initial launch.

Branded games are trackable

By using a viral Flash tracking service in your branded game you can measure the success of your campaign. Detailed information about who is interacting with your brand over hundreds of independent websites can be made available via one control panel.

Branded games give worldwide exposure

Not only do branded games provide great online exposure, because of the nature of the internet they are great for spreading awareness outside your particular country. Potential customer from all over the world can see and play your branded game.

You don’t need paid placements

Although you can use them, paid placements really aren’t necessary, unlike banner ads where a considerable cost is incurred to get the finished ads in front of people. There’s a huge number of online games portals and community websites that will feature quality branded games for free. Because they offer something of value above and beyond the advertising to both webmasters and players many online gaming website owners are happy to do this.

Simon Walklate is a UK based professional web game designer who specialises in the production of free-to-play Flash games.

Although most people still associate viral marketing with video and YouTube, achieving satisfactory results with commercial viral video marketing has become difficult, due to over saturation. Viral games however can still provide great results, almost always surpassing those of video campaigns, here’s why:

Viral games are much easier to seed successfully

Because of the many high traffic online games community sites and portals that are constantly looking for new content it’s easy to get you game featured. These website will often feature new games on the front page, providing massive amounts of traffic to your viral game and potentially getting your game played by millions worldwide. Try getting on the front page of YouTube or any of the other high profile video sharing sites and see how far you get. The sheer volume of submissions the video sharing sites get makes it virtually impossible to get anywhere near the front page, which means your video just gets lost amongst millions of others.

Viral games get consistently higher viewing figures

Because they are easier to seed and get in front of people, viral games generally get seen and played by many more people than videos. It’s common for viral games to achieve millions of plays, whereas only a very small number of the very best viral videos can hope to compete with these numbers.

You can put web links into viral games

It’s easy to insert clickable links to your business or product website into your viral game. And people do click them (usually in their thousands). Typical clickthrough rates on a viral game are over 10% (many times higher than banner ads). It’s impossible to include a clickable link in viral videos, the best you can do is include your web address within the video and hope people visit your site. The actual traffic generated this way can’t hope to compete with direct clickthroughs from a viral game.

Viral games are interactive

Viral games draw the viewer in and encourage them to interact with your brand, rather than just passively watch the advert. This can give your advert a much greater impact, make it much more memorable and increase the chances of people coming back for repeat plays.

Viral games are more cost effective than viral videos

Given the above and the fact that production costs are similar, viral games give you a much better return on your investment. Viral games consistently reach a much larger audience for roughly the same cost as viral videos.

You can accurately track results with viral games

The success of viral videos can be very difficult to monitor accurately over multiple sites and trying to determine additional viewer information can be nearly impossible. Its easy to incorporate a viral tracking system into your viral game code in order to monitor detailed statistics about your campaign. Using either one of the free or paid tracking systems devised specifically for viral Flash or even Google Analytics, you can track exactly who is playing your viral game, what country they are from, how long they play for and how they interact with the game, such as web link clickthroughs. This is invaluable for keeping track of how well your viral game is performing. This sort of accurate data just isn’t easily available with viral videos.

Viral videos can be used to promote games but not vice versa

Although it may sound odd at first, viral video is a great inexpensive way to get some extra traffic to your viral game. We use simple gameplay videos to accomplish this. Because they are just video screen grabs they take very little time/money to put together. Conversely, using a viral game to promote a viral video just isn’t possible or even desirable, for obvious reasons.

When thinking about your next viral marketing campaign, be sure to consider these points when making your decision about whether to stick with video or try out a more effective viral game.

Simon Walklate is a partner in UK based online game designer The Motion Monkey who specialise in viral game design.

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.

If your advergame is to succeed, you need to consider two main factors:

1) Is your game worthwhile to the online gaming community?

Grabbing the attention of your audience should always be the primary goal of any advergame. The longer people play your game and the more people return for repeat plays, the more exposure your brand, product or service will get. Therefore it’s essential to make your advergame something worth experiencing. Your online exposure and brand awareness depend on how good this experience is. Creating a truly immersive game that people want to and enjoy playing is the only way to guarantee the best results for your business. You will only ever get out what you put in.

2) Do online gaming community websites embrace 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.

Simon Walklate is a partner in Bristol, UK based Flash game designer The Motion Monkey who specialise in advergaming.

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