Entries Tagged 'Marketing Tips' ↓

I was at Codemasters at a time when online marketing grew from just about zero to being a major force. This presented new opportunities and new problems. Personally I saw it as a great thing. The potential to talk to potential customers, globally, interactively and in real time is a phenomenal marketing opportunity.

We were really lucky in that when Flashpoint came along and we had virtually no marketing spend we were able to put a lot of energy into the low cost areas of PR and online and still get a global number one. Also we must have been one of the first to look at the community side of MMORPGs and translate it over to our console titles. Having people working full time in online community liaison is essential these days.

The great thing about online marketing is that it cuts through the bullshit. You have many thousands of public voices out there saying how it really is. And you can’t shout louder than them. So the conventional marketing tactic of throwing money at telling customers what they want has decreased in relevance enormously. Increasingly bad games do not succeed. However a good marketeer will still make a huge difference in shaping perceptions and so getting the best sales performance. There is more in this article.

The most powerful marketing element now is the creation of a good, solid, monthly PR story. This is the much needed content that the interweb loves. And it is great ammunition for the community people. So here are a few elements of online marketing:

• The newsletter. This can contain the monthly story and loads of other updates, borrowing content from other online activities. Building your email mailing list is a key activity.
• The blog. Every game should have one. Members of the development team as well as community liaison and PR can make regular contributions. (Several per week) This should be a real engine to build a body of content on the web.
• The forum. Where everyone can chat about everything to do with the game. It is important to pitch a level of censorship appropriate to the game. The public really appreciate interacting with the development team, so having an insider answer a pressing question is worth a lot.
• Virals. Mini games, funny videos etc. These can work incredibly well if they catch on. You can use all your other online tools to make sure that they do.
• Webcams. I have always liked the idea of webcams in the development studio, so the public can see all the work going into creating their game. It can be a great talking point and the developers can have lots of fun with their public.
• Community activity across the popular forums and blogs. If there is a discussion about your game on someone elses site then you can join in and add value to the discussion.
• Competitions. These can create lots of interest, but should be integrated into the other online elements to get the best results.
• Working the non game interweb. If you are doing a motor-sport game then you need to be doing all the above to the online motor-sport community. Obviously the same applies to football, chess, whatever…..

All the above are low cost activities, all it takes is people and work. Using these is an ideal method for a developer creating their own IP. You can create a real buzz which adds enormously to the value of the game before going to a potential publisher. This is where big earnings lie.

Then there is online advertising which is yet another story.

Please add any comments you may have on this below.

In Q4 1987, at Codemasters, I ran a trade advertising campaign in CTW. As budget publishers on very tight margins there was not a lot of marketing spend, so this was a big deal. The campaign consisted of weekly mono early right hand full pages. Every week I created a new trade specific advert with the artist Nigel Fletcher (who was doing commercial work then) and delivered it directly to CTW’s printer. This enabled us to have the tightest deadlines and so make the adverts fresh and current.

This was the most successful advertising campaign of my life. We totally dominated the Gallup chart all the way up to Christmas in a way that even Electronic Arts would be envious of.

These days CTW has been replaced by MCV. And they have adapted to the internet age. You can receive the print magazine electronically anywhere in the world. There are email Daily Digests and Newsflashes and a website where you can add your input to current news stories. It provides a huge and essential service to the games industry.

So, with my experience, it amazes me that MCV isn’t a lot thicker. With advertising. Here is a marketing opportunity to reach a huge chunk of the industry, not just in the UK, but worldwide. Not only that, it is also read by a lot of journalists which gives it’s content a multiplier effect. It is a huge amount more influential than the statistics show.

Another thing that amazes me is the retail adverts that appear in there. This is just sloppy and lazy. You are reaching a completely different audience so the message you want to reach them with is completely different. It looks like some people look upon trade advertising as an afterthought to create some product awareness. When really it is an immensely powerful tool to reach a very important audience with messages targeted specifically at them.

And to give you an idea how highly I value the readership of MCV, it is the only place that I advertise this site.

As ever please add your comments.

The piracy at the end of the PS1 really tore the heart out of the video games industry. At Codemasters we had massive redundancies. So when Operation Flashpoint came along we didn’t have much of a marketing budget. Liz Darling and her team of marketing creatives produced a superb visual brand, as always. This combined with a really special game gave us something to work with.

So the main marketing thrust became PR and online, especially the community side of online. There was nearly zero advertising. And the game went to number one in every market with a chart, including the USA, where it was, and still is, Codemasters’ only ever number one.

Now we have another PC number one that has gone down the PR route. Football Manager 2008 from Sports Interactive is one of the top ten fastest selling PC games ever in the UK. With a “cash free” media blitz they have proven, once again, that brains work just as well as money when you want to reach your potential customers.

I think a lot of marketeers buy advertising out of habit. Or to get rid of the budget. Or because they don’t know any better. Or, as I have seen, all three. It is still very true that many avenues of marketing are relatively lightly trodden by the games industry. Perhaps part of this has to do with our historic obsession with adolescent boys. Part to do with the fact that game magazine advertising teams have always been one of the most professional parts of the industry. But there is no real excuse for such bias in the marketing mix.

So are you a gratuitous spender on advertising, or a stealthy manipulator of the marketing mix? Post your comments below.

One of the biggest issues and trends in gaming is the way that gaming is drifting towards social networking and vice versa. So eventually they will meet in the middle and make up one big industry. I have written about this on here before.

In May this year Facebook opened itself to outside developers. In 6 months over 6,000 applications have been written (some of which are games) and already millionaires have been made. So Facebook is now a gaming platform. In the last year their membership went up by 134% whilst rival MySpace has only seen an increase of 12% (though it is still much bigger than Facebook). Much of this difference is down to those 6,000+ applications. It hardly came as a suprise then when last week Rupert Murdoch announced that MySpace too would allow external developers in (maybe he is reading this blog!). And this week Oberon Media announced that they are creating a game channel there. So now MySpace is a gaming platform.

There is obviously a massive market here for games, monetised with advertising. However there is also a great viral marketing opportunity. To create mini games on Facebook and MySpace that work to support your mainstream games on the dedicated platforms. You could easily reach tens of millions of exactly the right demographic for very little spend.

So are you a social networker? Can you see the opportunities here? Please add your comments.

Just a quickie. I have told you a couple of times about this article which every game marketeer should read.

Now here is another must read article. This time for every professional who wants to understand the industry they work in. It is really incisive knowledge.

So do you know of anything else that could be considered to be essential reading?

Our industry is currently in the middle of a seismic shift. Largely due to the influence of Nintendo we are changing from an industry that targeted adolescent boys to an industry that provides interactive entertainment for everyone. Inevitable, and despite the censorship imposed by the platform holders, many of us will be involved in products with adult content. We will see more and more products like Red Light Centre, an adult virtual world.

Our problem as marketeers is marketing such products. The web is divided into two with very little overlap. There is the normal web of Google, ebay, social networking, blogs and so on. Then there is the $7 billion online porn industry. The split between the two parts is reinforced by the prudery of people like Goggle who do not allow Adwords/Adsense for adult content. And online PR services such as PRWeb refusing to handle anything adult.

So I have a couple of tips for reaching adult audiences. Adbrite is an online advertising service not too unlike to that offered by Google. If you browse the web you will be familiar with their service. I use their text ads on Artforums. Unlike Google Adbrite have an adult advertising service AVN Ads which is an identical service but for the other half of the internet.

The second tip is to advertise on the huge adult site Stile Project which has 9 million visitors a month and very reasonable advertising rates. I know of a recent $1250 test campaign there that generated 11,000 visitors. Quality too, they stayed for an average of over 5 minutes and visited over 7 pages.

So do you know any cost effective ways to reach adult content audiences?

Everyone knows that game sales are biggest in Q4 because of the gift market through the holiday season. So game publishers concentrate their big releases for this time. This has two effects. Firstly it acts as a self fulfilling prophecy and Q4 becomes bigger precisely because there are so many new games. Secondly it reduces the size of the overall market. This is because people earn money and play games all year round. So publishers shoot themselves in the foot by not catering for this.

Fortunately this year we have technology forcing a more sensible release policy on many. Basically the 360 and especially the PS3 are more difficult to create games for than previous platforms. So lots of games are missing deadlines and moving into next year. Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway, Unreal Tournament 3, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, World in Conflict, The Club, Grand Theft Auto IV and Splinter Cell are just some of the titles effected.

This is excellent news. Game releases will be better spread out and fewer AAA titles will be going head to head against each other. So more games will be sold. Which is good for the industry.

When I was at Codemasters I lobbied hard for the principle of launching one product a month, every month. Other than the above this has the added great advantage that everyone in sales and marketing can move smoothly from one product to the next. Giving each game full and proper attention whilst not having any slack times.

So do you think the Q4 rush is good or bad?