Website Marketing Club

Why Less Is Not More With Advergames

Nov 2, 2009 Advertising

Advergames are seen by many marketers as just a way to get an advert for their product, brand or service placed on other websites and in front of their visitors. Often this means they think the best thing to do is spend as little as possible to achieve this. But why should you spend more on your custom advergame?

The fact is most marketers seem to want to treat advergames as a means to an end. Thinking having a cheap web based interactive widget developed and trying to pass it off as a game will do. In reality this rarely works. By using advergames you’re essentially marketing your website, product or service to the vast online gaming community, so you need to provide something worthwhile to this target audience. Otherwise you may have just wasted a chunk of your marketing budget on a game that will provide little value to your business.

The success of any advergame depends on two main factors:

1) Does the online gaming community want to play your game?

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?

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.

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 designer The Motion Monkey who specialise in advergame development.

Tags: advergames, advergaming, Advertising, Business, computers, flash games, games, gaming, marketing, online advertising, online games, online marketing, web games