Entries Tagged 'Marketing Tips' ↓

The need to play is an irrepressible part of the human spirit, we all do it all our lives. We make games out of the most unlikely daily chores. And we use the most unlikely things as toys when we play.

Here is a video of a traditional English game using a cheese:

So it should come as no surprise when the hottest thing on the interweb becomes used for games. Even though it was never designed for this task.

Here is a Zork game on Twitter. A text adventure, Battleships and an RPG. But the most impressive for the marketeers reading this must be this puzzle game for the new Terminator movie. The first advergaming on Twitter. And a brilliant example of creative marketing capturing the zeitgeist.

Source.

Press release:

Marketing expert talks at University

The University’s ‘Creative Networks’ is hosting a talk by Bruce Everiss who will speak about his experiences in marketing and establishing two major video game companies, Imagine and Codemasters. He will be appearing at the event which is being held on Thursday 28 May at Millennium Point, Curzon Street at 6pm.

In the digital age, we are all Marketeers and, in the current challenging economic climate, finding innovative ways to promote and distribute content via new media platforms is all important.

Bruce has been involved with the home computer industry since its start in the late 1970s and his commitment to the medium has helped to establish the U.K. as one of the world’s most important software producers. Furthermore, as an internet entrepreneur and marketing expert, he has raised the industry’s profile beyond the attention of enthusiasts and into the psyche of a much wider audience.

Creative Networks was established in 2004 as a regular monthly hub of networking and expertise for creative companies and freelancers in the West Midlands. The event is free, anyone interested in attending should email creative.networks@tic.ac.uk or call Dave Taylor on 0121 331 7457. Alternatively, register online at www.creativenetworksonline.com

It is a very simple fact of life that the thing that most people are interested in is other people. Just look at the mass obsession over Princess Diana or Jade Goody. And as marketeers we can take advantage of this interest to get our messages communicated more easily to the people we want to reach.

I know about this because I have done it a number of times. At Imagine in Liverpool with David Lawson, Mark Butler, John Gibson and Ian Weatherburn. But most of all with Eugene Evans, who even got invited to No 10 Downing Street to meet Margaret Thatcher. Then at Codemasters with the Darling brothers, who got to meet the Queen as a result and with the Oliver twins. It is interesting that the Darling boys were in business with their father Jim for 20 years, but I didn’t make him famous. When the government came to hand out honours the boys both got CBEs and Jim got nothing.

The master of building and using fame in the British game industry is Peter Molyneux (he has an OBE, can you begin to see the connection here?) who has been relentless at self promotion for a long time. It has made him a lot of money and sold a lot of games so you can’t knock him for it.

The thing about being famous is that you transcend the industry so you reach a whole level of new and different media. Also you become a respected voice and your name appears in the strangest of places. Just as Jade Goody’s has in this article.

So here are some tools:

• Press releases. Just about every press release has a quote in, Rob Uncle is delighted with the deal: “We are going to make a lot of money here”.  This will not work to make him famous. To make him famous he needs to say something startling: “This game will cause the rotation of the world to stop at 9AM GMT tomorrow”. Or, and this is much better, the press release needs to be about him: “Ace programmer George Eek simulates Kylie Minogue with artificial intelligence breakthrough”. If you keep your ear to the ground in your organisation and keep your creativity switched on you will soon come up with suitable stories.
• Interviews. These are great for lazy journalists and excellent for getting your messages over. Hence the eternal popularity of the TV chat show. In our industry we are always dealing with secrets so people love to read interviews to see if they can get enough information to double guess such stuff. So it is worth promoting people for being interviewed all the time, everyone wins.
• Articles. Perfection, your would be famous person gets their message over in their own words. And each time they do it they accumulate more fame. This humble little blog you are reading has brought me more fame than 30 years of working in home computers and video games in fairly high profile positions.
• Public speaking. A lot of people are shy of doing this. No need, treat it as if you are talking to one person, but revel in the power of getting your message over in the most immediate and personal way to key audiences. GDC and E3 are typical events where you can become famous in half an hour. Look at how the arch marketeer, Steve Jobs, uses public speaking as one of his main marketing tools. And look at how Microsoft use it in breadth and depth in their organisation to get their messages over.
• Videos. I cannot begin to over emphasise just how important videos have become in marketing. And most marketeers are well behind the curve of what is happening in the real world. Videos become a lot more interesting when you put people in them, so once again you can build fame. Any marketeer in an international publisher should have no problem in getting literally millions of views for a video. That is a lot of influence.
• Publicist. Max Clifford in the UK is perhaps the most well known, but there are plenty more. These people use their press contacts to carefully build and manage your fame. They know what can and what can’t be done. And the best of them are brilliant at their job.

In all this don’t forget the message. It has to be interesting enough to catch and hold people’s attention whilst at the same time getting your key marketing messages across. Most importantly, go and do it. Our industry is lagging well behind in creating our own celebrities to represent what we do. If we did more of this we would be taken a lot more seriously in the world. And it is one of the easiest forms of marketing to do.

I have possibly mentioned before about the real world people (including myself) who lent their likenesses to characters within the worldwide number one game Operation Flashpoint in 2001. This garnered us significant publicity as our local MP, James Plaskitt agreed to be in the game when visiting me at Codemasters. A successful marketing ploy. Now someone has kindly sent me a link to a montage of the faces used.

I thought it was about time just to helicopter a bit and look at some of the principles of marketing video games. An overall view of this art/science.

The first thing to understand is that with zero marketing a game will achieve precisely zero sales, no matter how good it is. Once you have told someone about a game you have started marketing it. In fact word of mouth is an immensely powerful marketing tool, especially amongst some demographics, such as school children. And it is a tool that marketeers try and propagate using techniques such as viral marketing and online community marketing.

This is how Google’s greatest strength has become its greatest weakness. Basically they started off with the best search engine in the world. And, by sheer product excellence and word of mouth, it became massive by far the most successful product on earth in its genre. But all the marketing was happening without Google themselves putting much effort into it. So when Google came up with other products they did not succeed to anywhere near the same extent. Because Google don’t have the necessary marketing culture. They expect products to succeed by their own, just like their original search did. This is one of the reasons that Google Lively failed, nobody knew what it was and what it was supposed to do, it was a marketing failure far more than it was a product failure.

The next thing to understand is that the more marketing you have for a product the more you will sell. Until you reach the law of diminishing returns. This is great for games because, after you have paid for development, most games cost very little for each additional unit of sale. So as long as you are spending 99 cents or preferably less for each incremental dollar of sale you are ahead. Once you realise this you can see that most games are under marketed. Of course the big problem comes with console games where you are paying a big license fee to the platform holder. This massively increases your incremental cost per extra unit of sales. Giving you a business model where there is far less freedom to market and where it is very easy to get badly bitten.

Another thing that is important to understand about marketing is that there are a huge number of tools available to the marketeer. TV advertising works completely differently to radio advertising and both of those work completely differently to specialist press advertising. And advertising is just one small aspect of marketing. Having the right visual imagery, good assets, creativity and the right attitude towards your customers are all vitally important. These you can utilise in your PR, videos, websites, virals, direct mail, communities, merchandise, competitions and a myriad of other tools. Taken together these are known as the marketing mix.

The power of different elements of the marketing mix changes over time, with what you are marketing and with the nature of your creativity and marketing content. Twenty years ago television was king with print just behind. Now both of these appear to be in terminal decline. Ten years ago online video was nothing, now it is immensely important. Some marketeers live in the past and don’t adapt to these changes which means that they under perform and waste money. Certainly the extent that certain global games publishers continue to throw money at television seems inept.

As a little side track here is what is wrong with advertising games on television:

The problem is that some people are instructed to burn their way through big budgets and they lack the imagination or hard work to spend it in better ways than television. I knew a game marketing person who was obsessed with movie advertising, he also was throwing money away for reasons very similar to the television reasons.

Back on track the number one most important element of any marketing is creativity. You are trying to get some (often complex) features and benefits over to a certain group of people. Most often these people don’t know that they need to receive these ideas. In fact they might even be wanting to reject your ideas. Try telling a Playstation fanatic that an Xbox 360 is a better console. And these people are being bombarded with many thousands of marketing messages every day. So how do you get yours through? With creativity. If what you do is different enough it will attract far more attention. But also it has a slightly higher probability of failure which is why too many marketeers do boring, safe, money wasting, “me too” marketing. They are cowards who would rather waste their employers money than take a little risk.

Now a bit more on targeting. You really have to know who you are trying to reach and you also have to truly understand the message you are trying to reach them with. “We are great” and “Buy this” are not always the best messages to be using! The message and the audience are fundamental to getting the best results for your effort. But have an open mind. The video game industry held itself back for years by targeting a certain small demographic. It was only when Nintendo had the brilliance to realise that a wider demographic could be entertained interactively that the rest of the industry saw the error of their ways. And some still haven’t.

Which brings us nicely to market research and analysts. These are excellent if you approach them with your brain switched on. Firstly market research is telling you history. And if you are a good marketeer you will be trying to change the future. Then there are the analysts. It is best to treat these as being wrong most of the time. Fo example they have all certainly got both the Wii and the PS3 wrong repeatedly in this generation. The good thing about reading the output of analysts is that they bring different thinking to the table. And the more different ways you can think about problems the better. Just don’t believe their predictions.

There is one whole aspect of game marketing where the whole  industry is pretty useless. And that is using people. The great public out there would far rather know about other people than they would about anything else. We have the massive cult of celebrity to prove this. Yet the games industry marketeers insist in talking about things instead of talking about people. A lesson other IP marketeers in industries like film and popular music learned to avoid many decades ago. If you make your chief game designer famous then the press will be far more interested in his latest haircut than how many FPS his latest game is running at. As an industry we will get there one day, but our under performance in this area is doing us no favours.

And remember that having amazing marketing knowledge and experience is not enough. You need to bring enthusiasm, commitment and sheer hard graft to everything you do. And you need to carry your team and all the other stakeholders with you. When a whole development team have put huge chunks of themselves and their lives into creating something then the marketeer is honour bound to ensure that he does everything in his power to ensure that it has the highest chance of success in the market.

Everybody reading this knows of the enormous importance of the interweb. How it provides instantaneous two way communication and how it is killing off the older, primitive media like newspapers, TV and magazines. They lack interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. And the interweb has been around for a few years now so you would assume that all intelligent educated people are aware of it and are using it.

So the results of research that has been conducted amongst British politicians are quite simply unbelievable. These people, who are elected by us to represent and look after us, haven’t the faintest idea what they are doing. Only 11% of British MPs blog and less than 25% use social networking. The vast majority, obviously, do not believe in having efficient two way communication with the people they represent. Anyone involved in video game marketing will find these figures unbelievable.

Instead of listening to us, it appears that most MPs believe that democracy consists of them telling us what they think and what to do. A full 83% of MPs have websites that they can lecture to us from. Or try to. As quite obviously any regular internet user is going to ignore such stuff and such attitudes.

But things are about to change because of the American example. By far the worst president in the history of the USA, George W Bush, famously did not even use email. Contrast that with Barack Obama who cannot be prised away from his Blackberry and who ran his election campaign largely online. Who believes in empowering the electorate. He has set an example that politicians worldwide now have no option but to follow.

Soon politicians who choose to ignore their constituency online will do so at their peril, because that constituency will reject them. It will be essential for elected politicians to interact with those that they represent. And, perhaps, we will have a better democracy.

You would expect a viral marketing company to be able to make a good viral to market themselves. Well here it is!