Session: Advertainment - Perfect for an Array of Targets

This session gave an audience of about 50 people on overview of advertainment and some real world examples of strategic uses of the tactics.

DMC Partner Justin Kirby said one major mistake among advertisers using the Internet is that they treat it like television and not like word of mouth, which is the crux of advertainment. Calling it "conversive buzz," Kirby said the key element of a successful advertainment campaign is compelling creative. It has to be good enough to get passed on virally.

The panel, which took a very rosy view of advertainment, concentrated on reaching the elusive 18-34 year-old male market, with emphasis on teenage boys, who are most responsive to video games. Backlash from bloggers to campaigns by Puma, Dr. Pepper and others was not discussed.

Panelists were:
- Dave Evans, GSD&M, moderator
- Dave Madden, Wild Tangent
- Kristen M. Kreibich-Staruch, Daimler Chrysler
-Ty Monague, Weiden + Kennedy

While we waited for the panel to begin, there was (yikes!) a commercial for Livemercial, an email program that delivers video in email. Looks like an interesting product but a strange placement in a presentation about ways to supercede interruption marketing.

Marketing through games, according to Kirby, is the toughest media type for advertisers. There are two ways to go: putting a product in an existing game or custom-publishing a new game. Kids play Grand Auto Theft, so when Daimler-Chrysler contemplated creating a road safety game, they knew they had to match the level of technology and interest in games teens use their allowance to buy.

Since 73 percent of teens between 12-17 use the Internet, and an "astronomical number" of teens die in automobile accidents, Kreibich-Staruch said Daimler-Chrysler wanted to develop a safety awareness program that could be virally marketed through teen influencers in the game arena.

The game, Street Wise, challenges teens through an obstable course with six levels, and inlcudes a simulation of driving drunk and of the distractions added by having several friends in a moving car with music blaring.

Kreibich-Staruch said that 91 percent who saw the game in a focus group said it increaed their safety awareness and 68 percent said it would change their behavior. Boys play it for an average of 12 minutes, she said, and noted that she hasn't gotten above level two. (Dave Madden of Wild Tangent, the game developer, said he hadn't gotten to level six.)

Justin Kirby from DMC said the Web is the most accessible channel for advertainment content because there is a category of users who seek them out, pass them on and talk about them. He showed DMC's campaign for Mazda RX-8, which showed a car being ticketed by a cop, who is grabbed into the car, heard grunting while the car shakes and then is thrown out in just his underwear, running down the street, ticket book in hand. The clip, which was originally sent to 40 sites, was funny enough that people emailed the clip to friends and hundreds of sites ran it. Does it sell cars? Who knows. It probably doesn't sell to the safety-awareness concerned Daimler folks.

Kirby said advertainment and gaming is best used to kick-start campaigns and to maintain brand awwareness. He noted that the game Hitman2 (www.hitman2.com) got picked up by Yahoo Buzz index and that more than one million units of the game were shipped.

Ty Montague of Weiden+Kennedy presented clips from the ESPN/Sega Beta7 campaign. The campaign invited seven leading gamers to become beta testers of the game and eventually sent them threatening letters demanding the beta be returned. Working with the creators of The Blair Witch Project, they did a film about the users' experience, which included their belief that subliminal messages in the game were causing blackouts and other strange behavior, like tackling strangers in elevators (it's a football game).

A tester named Beta7 created a blog in which he accused Sega of trying to harm the beta group with the game and then withholding the fact that they knew blackouts and other side effects were caused by playing the game.

It was, IMHO, a convoluted story that clearly smacked of commercialism, but that may be because I already knew the story from reading about it on slashdot and other blogs. Call me a cynic, but an advergame has to be pretty frickin wondeful before I am going to want to play it. But then again, I'm not a teenage boy (thank God).

The key to success in advertainment, Kirby said, is hiring smart people, getting out of their way; knowing the market really, really well, and reserving measurement for the back end. Viral campaigns fail, he says, but so do major motion pictures, TV sitcoms, new music from major bands and books that were supposed to be blockbusters. Nonehteless, he said, advertainment is enjoying enough current success to make the calculated risk worthwhile.

One guy in Kentucky who has influence in his peer network, Kirby said, can do more for a campaign than all of MSN. He maintained that content has to be presented as editorial and NOT as advertising in order to get an 18-34 year-old to pass it on. Those who feel they have been tricked will forgive you, the panelists agreed, if your creative was cool enough to have been entertaining.

People are only offended by product placement, Montague said, if it is out of context. Films, he noted, always give the hero a MAC whether Microsoft is paying for the placement or not because the brand story itself makes using the MAC cool. The product is used to show that the character is a creative iconoclast. Otherwise, he said, product placement can be as annoying as a pop-up ad.

Kirby said the advertising community needs to view the Internet more like the telephone than like TV or print. The Inernet is active, not passive and that makes it ripe for advertainment.

Marketing Wonk's Rick Bruner asked the panelists if there is a saturation point, beyond which viewers would get fed up with advertainment, and the panelists responded that the key is keeping the content interesting.

What about everyone besides teenage boys? Kreibich-Staruch noted that females 35-55 actually buy most games and that middle-aged women are the fastest growing gaming market. Seems more likely that they are buying games for their kids.

I asked about the backlash of bad press created by campaign's like Puma's and Dr. Pepper's, where bloggers took the companies to task for making up false stories. Evans noted that the issue of legislation around bait and switch advertising and truth in advertising has to be considered. However, since the viral marketing audience is self-selecting, they can tune out as easily as they tune in.