Gate Articles

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?

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) Will websites want to feature your game?

The other factor in the success of any advergame is the spread of the game amongst gaming community websites and blogs. This is absolutely essential in order to get your advergame in front of the numbers of players it needs to be successful. Without traffic from third party websites, which either host the game themselves or link to the game on your website, you’ll be left with a game that gets very few plays. Quite simply the better the game, the more buzz it will generate, the wider it will spread, the more exposure your brand will get and the more traffic will be directed from the game to your website or online store. Conversely, if your advergame is rubbish, very few people will want to play it, or share it with others and again it will fail to produce satisfactory results.

So if you’re thinking of using advergames as part of your business marketing, always remember that the more you put in, the more you will get out and ultimately the greater the success will be. All advergames should be a great immersive game in their own right, first and foremost, the advertising should always be secondary. This will benefit you brand with much greater engagement with your audience, and much greater traffic to your website or online store. To make your advergame successful means allocating the largest budget you can manage to the game, rather than trying to spend as little as possible.

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