Entries Tagged 'Marketing Tips' ↓

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?

A blog is an enormously powerful enabling tool, potentially anyone on planet earth can put their views in front of everyone on planet earth. This has led to all sorts of interesting phenomenon. The Baghdad blogger told us what it was like to be living in a country that we, the West, were (illegally) attacking. This gave us a unique insight into what it was like to be on the other side.

In computer games we have the EA Spouse who, by revealing working conditions and pay, succeeded in improving the lives of thousands of game industry workers. It has become a very powerful marketing tool. Every game should have a development blog that enables potential customers to follow the story of what they are going to buy.

Now we have Nintendo technical recruiter Jessica Zenner (pen name Jessica Carr) sacked for writing about work.

Here is an extract from her blog: “One plus about working with hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily” “My gut tells me that this woman hasn’t been fu***d in years.”

About 5 or 6 years ago, before the blog explosion, I was using Google in different ways to research Codemasters’ online presence. I came across a blog from one of our employees, Andrew Pallister, which was a detailed written and photographic diary of his life. It is called MeDiaryPics. And any journalist or competitor would have made hay with the contents. Hundreds of photographs of inside the company and a detailed log of all his work on our games. All created in innocence of the potential downside.

So obviously I told my superiors. I also had to explain to them what a blog was. What I was hoping was that we could stop the potential leaking and at the same time harness Andrew’s knowledge and talent for marketing advantage. But HR have a very one dimensional view on life. Andrew was asked to remove all the sensitive stuff from his blog, which must have taken him ages. A blog policy (ie don’t write anything about the company) was instituted and sent to every employee. Marketing opportunity lost.

So is your company frightened of blogs or does it embrace them for the good that they can do?

Sega have a great competition. You write an advert for Sega Rally on your vehicle and send them a picture of it. They pick the best photo and the winner gets a rally experience, a PS3 and a copy of the game. Done well this could get advertising slogans seen all over Britain. The problem is that they only have 5 submissions on their website. So either they forgot to tell the public or nobody wants the prize.

Maybe I should go and get my Caterham dirty and apply my marketing mind to a slogan. A rally experience could be fun.

So have you tried any zany marketing ideas? And did they work?

During world war one the allies wanted to know what was happening inside Germany. What people were thinking and doing. The effect of the war on them and the routine of their lives. The allies could have recruited a lot of spies but instead they had a far better and more effective idea. What they did was to obtain every possible local newspaper from across Germany and then analyse their content.

This mechanism used the editors of the newspapers firstly as unsuspecting spies and secondly as low level analysts. It works like this, the editor has only so much space to fill and only so much time to fill it yet he has access to enough potential content to fill it several times over. So he works as a filter deciding what goes into the newspaper and what doesn’t. This filtering process did the allies job for them because the content of the paper told them what was currently of importance to the German population.

You can take advantage of this mechanism when marketing computer games. Just like the world war two newspaper every game periodical has finite space and finite time to fill it yet they have enough potential content to fill it several times over. Each journalist has only so much time to gather material and then so much time to write content. So if you take a journalist’s time it follows that you have the space in his periodical. As simple as that.

You see it very widely in other industries. Car manufacturers launch new models in exotic places and fly the journalists in. They know that with travel time they can take a week out of a journalist’s schedule and they know that this guarantees them a quarter of that journalist’s output for the month.

This was precisely the mechanism I used at Codemasters. Regularly flying in batches of journalists from our European territories to visit sunny Southam. And they always said yes. It was a free overseas trip and the chance to see a games company from the inside and pick up all sorts of knowledge and information. When they got back they wrote up lovely multi page features. But in reality they had no option about this because we had used up their time and so there was nothing else that they could write. It also deprived our competition of those pages.

We were also after the holy grail of selling more of our games in America. This is a rock on which many British game companies have foundered. So I tried to institute a mechanism of flying over an American journalist a month to visit us. With travel this gave us about a week of their valuable time. And there was no shortage of journalists wanting to come. And we tried it and it worked. But the powers that be preferred to spend (waste) their money on TV advertising. And we continued to fail in America.

On a slightly different tack this is an excellent article on marketing computer games from a journalist’s perspective. It should be essential reading for everyone involved in marketing in this industry.

So have I wasted bandwidth stating the obvious? Or are all the world’s game journalists suddenly going to find themselves invited on trips to exotic places (me! me! me!)? Post your comments below.

Seems like an obvious question, but so much marketing is done by rote that many people forget.

Game player. This is the person who sits in front of the screen and plays your game. You have got to make him want to do this, because without him you don’t have a business.

Game retail buyer. This is often not the same person as the game player, which is a very important factor in the success of Take Two. The buyer will often be a parent of the player. So they may want their kid to be the coolest on the block, or the brightest. Or maybe they just want to shut the nagging brat up. Come December and all sorts of people, who would never ordinarily buy a game, are queuing up in game shops to buy gifts. So you can get sales by being featured in a housekeeping magazine!

Trade buyer. This is your immediate customer so he could well be the most valuable of all. Hence the incredible value of the trade press, which many underestimate. Your trade buyer must be kept very well informed and completely in the loop at all times. Never lose sight of this person and don’t just rely on your sales people to look after him. Sales people don’t have the same priorities as marketing people.

Employee. A lot of management guru type people say that it is more important to market internally than externally. (I was especially miffed when they dropped the internal newspaper at Codemasters after I was promoted away from communications). Certainly if you have the right people then you have everything else. Communications are of massive importance when recruiting and keeping the right people as well as getting the best out of them.

Shareholder. It is their company. They own it. So you may as well keep them in the loop and tell them what is going on. Especially as they have a vested interest in buying your products.

Wall Street/TheCity. Where the money comes from that pays for everything. These people don’t just want to know the financial, they want to know everything. So tell them.

Local Community.  These are the people you live and work among, the people from whom you recruit many of your staff. Make sure they know about you and that what they know is good.

Politician. At Codemasters I worked with the local MPs to help successfully get the law on conterfeiting changed in the UK, an example of what can be achieved. We photographed one MP and put his image into Operation Flashpoint which we then used as a story which ran very well. (btw my image is also in Operation Flashpoint)

Journalist. You want to reach these people as individual human beings as well as being a conduit to their audience. Journalists have preferences, views and opinions that come out in thousands of subtle ways that have influence. So nurture them.

Business partner. You think I am scraping the bottom of the barrel now but I am not. The people that your company has a day to day relationship with are very important. All your suppliers, whether it be outsourced graphics or stationery, want to know about you. So tell them.

We are really so lucky in games that the story we have to tell is just so sexy. So tell it. People really, really want to know.

So do you do all this, or do you just buy a few television slots and cross your fingers that you might be reaching someone worth spending all that money on? As ever post your views using comments.