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?
Trying to convince most marketers of the merits of spending any more than the bare minimum on any project can be an uphill struggle, advergames are no different. The problem is you’re trying to get your brand in front of the vast online gaming community. With a massive and increasing number of quality free-to-play web based games on offer, you need to give them a reason to give your advergame the time of day. Just throwing together a minimal interactive web based widget on a miniscule budget is unlikely to accomplish this, and it’s likely you’ll be wasting a chunk of your marketing budget.
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?
Getting your advergame in front of the largest audience possible means getting it featured on the websites they visit. It’s not enough to just put your advergame on your website and hope the players will come, doing this guarantees failure. But why should they feature your advergame? This is where you need to give them great content that their visitors will want to read about and/or play. A great game will spread far and wide over the internet, being picked up and either hosted or written about and linked to by many gaming community sites, games portals and blogs. In some cases you may even get your game featured in traditional media such as magazines, radio or even TV. The better the game, the more you increase the chances of this happening. On the other hand, if your game is rubbish, very few websites are likely to feature it.
Although the natural tendency is to think of advergames purely from an advertising perspective and think about how to get the most advert from the least spend, this can do more harm than good. The primary goal of any advergame should always be to provide a great free-to-play gaming experience, with the advertising coming secondary. Unfortunately providing that great gaming experience usually requires allocating a reasonable production budget, which many marketers are reluctant to do. A realistic budget to create a great game in it’s own right will reward your business with greater engagement with your audience, increased brand awareness and much greater traffic to your website or online store.
Simon Walklate is a partner in Bristol, UK based Flash game developers The Motion Monkey who specialise in advergaming.
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