Random Thoughts
July 3, 2023
I must admit that I was never a strong believer in attending industry conferences or seminars (especially in the marketing research industry), as I always thought of them as events where industry fellows gather to gossip amongst each other, and rarely ever did any talks give any impactful insights. But my mind is beginning to change after attending last week’s virtual event hosted by Adweek on in-game advertising, where there was quite a bit of eye-opening insight takeaways for me.
And this is precisely why I will use this week’s Random Thought post on it. I will recap for those of you who did not have a chance to attend the event the few impactful takeaways I got from it. Hopefully, this will help you in some way.
The first insight I am going to highlight here is one that I have previously stated in other Random Thoughts posts (and arguably a given at this point), but it is still important to lay the foundation of this post with it. With 3 billion gamers globally expected by end of 2023, chances are your customers are gamers, and you need to be proactive and 'go to them there' (as one of the presenters stated). With the interactive nature of gaming, you as marketers and advertisers will be presented with unprecedented possibilities to create an engaging two-way conversation with your customers that yield strong bond with them like never before. And it is arguably one of the most efficient marketing efforts as it allows you to target your customer globally just through one single gaming platform. But given the time it takes to create a marketing campaign within the video gaming (or metaverse) space—often hear two years being the norm, you will need to start now.
The second insight I want to highlight here is one that is quite new to me. Throughout the seminar, I kept hearing the message that advertisers and game developers are now “partners” and not of the traditional “client” and “supplier” relationship. That is, game developers will only work with you and incorporate your advertising actions into their game if it adds value to their game. So after you identify the game title you want to conduct your marketing activities in, you better have some ideas of what you want to do in their game, because it is as much as you pitching to them as they are pitching to you.
The third insight I want to highlight here is also connected to the second one I just mentioned. It is that if you want your advertising or marketing efforts in-game to be successful, it will need to be a seamless part of the gameplay, that it cannot be a disruptive force to the game. Gamers are sensitive to the game they are playing, and it takes little to turn them off from the game. Plastering advertisements in the game without it being actually a part of the gameplay is only going to be disruptive and intrusive, and will certainly risk turning gamers off from the game. Game developers know that very well, and that is why it is crucial that your marketing actions only add value to the game. Take for example the partnership between L’Oréal and Candy Crush. L’Oréal launched a new fragrance called Prada Candy by incorporating it as a new level within the Candy Crush gameplay. They did it without telling the players what Prada Candy is, and that subsequently aroused curiosity amongst the players. The end result is a significant increase in Prada Candy’s website visit as players search online for what that is.
The last point I want to raise here is much closer to the end-user or marketing research industry I am involved in. One of the comments that I caught was from the CMO of Claire’s, where she mentioned that she used Shimmerville (the digital world they created on Roblox) to test products and get instant results from it. Now, even though the research they conducted on the metaverse must be shallow in nature (it is likely just dropping a few product designs and see which one the gamers select most, without knowing why as you cannot probe questions at this stage), but this still got me thinking about the state of particularly the qualitative research industry. That is, we cannot stay backward and still conduct our research offline. We need to be at least trying to move qualitative research online and make it the norm. And in the same time begin to investigate just how we can conduct qualitative research in the metaverse in the near future. We have to admit that this is where clients are heading to, and just like the clients are doing to meet their customers in the gaming world, we need to meet our clients in the metaverse as well.
Well, that’s all from me this week. Hopefully, as always, it’s been helpful to you. Do feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts. As importantly, remember to follow us on our LinkedIn page for more! Until next time!
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