Research For Campaign

Gamification Essay Draft

To what degree is gamification of marketing changing the online advertising environment?

Advertising, by definition, is the techniques used to sell a product or idea. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the internet and smartphones have given the advertising industry not only a way to get one on one access to the people it is advertising to, but it has also lead to the ability to provide interactivity as well, invaluable tools for gathering demographic information, and also for directly advertising. Gamification is one marketing strategy that has come out of this constant access to the public, and I believe, of the reasons that a large majority of the advertising world is beginning to shift to a mobile space.

So what exactly is gamification? It’s the idea of using gambling and gaming to sell a product. Applications such as FourSquare, which rewards you based on the amount of times you have checked into a place, and GetGlue, which provides stickers based on what movies and television shows you’re watching, are examples of using instant gratification, and rewards, to inspire an audience into taking part in your product. If you’ve ever bought a Happy Meal from McDonalds, where they allow you scratch a card off to win something, they’re relying on your need to “get” something out of the product, to inspire you into buying said product.

In line with this, human beings are proven to be more receptive to an idea that provides instant gratification, meaning that they immediately feel gratified by what they have done. This idea works similarly to the way that addictive drugs do, in that you get a rush of dopamine, causing your mind to feel happy, even for a moment, which we then begin to crave. This idea translates to a large amount of the internet, where everything is instantaneous.

Gamification manipulates this idea of instant gratification into making you want to buy something, not just for the product, but for what you get as well as the product. On the Internet, services that actively try and sell products, such as Amazon and Steam, as well as other smaller sites, use this as a sort of gambling-marketing hybrid.

Steam, the worlds largest digital video game distributor, runs a holiday sale each year at Christmas, and again in the summer. These sales typically discount a game by at least 25%, but usually a lot higher, going up as high as 90%. This is usually enough to get somebody to jump on the deals, simply because of the massive price increase. However, they have recently begun making the sales into a game, as well. When purchasing a game during this years Christmas sale, they rewarded you with a card. This card would be one of a group of ten, selected at random. Once you had ten of these cards, you were able to turn them in to a badge, to get a couple of extra items for your account. What this did was cause people to firstly enjoy the gamble of getting a card when they bought a game. Where they going to get one they already had? Would it finish their collection? As mentioned above, this triggered a release of dopamine, causing the user to become happy. This is the same theory behind gambling. Get the user to feel happy after interacting with your product, and they’ll buy more. This gamification of Steam takes it a step further. Provide the user with an actual reward, 100% of the time. Give them an item, and it will cause them to put more money into the store, in the hopes of getting more of said items. The ability to combine these items into more items, again with that thrill of not knowing what you’re going to get, inspires that gambling thrill in the mind, and makes users throw more and more into the system, again in a sort of gambling-shopping fusion.

This is just one example of how games are used to make a product or service more appealing to a consumer. As stated above, lots of companies are beginning to offer rewards for using their products, and some services are even hard-embedding them into the way they work. An example of this is FourSquare, a social network based around checking in to places as you visit them. For example, when a user checks into a location, he gets a badge added to his collection. The person that owns the most of these badges from one location becomes that locations “mayor”. This fosters competition between frequent customers, and drives them to visit more. FourSquare takes advantage of this frequent use of the application by competitors to drive up advertisement views, and encourages businesses to take part through being able to drive up visitors.

Gamification is the transformation of advertising into games, and takes advantage of the human minds predisposition towards gambling, collection, and addiction, to invoke feelings of loyalty and joy in the customer or user of a product, and ties it to the Internet, which is ever present since the advent of smartphones. The world of advertising and marketing is changing towards being more centralised around gamification, due to these advantages, especially in the format of selling products to a customer. Through phone applications, the ability to monitor purchases is growing, and the market is changing to take advantage of what gamification provides them, both in customer loyalty, and selling potential.

Essay Thesis Statement

Essay Thesis:

To what degree is gamification of marketing changing the online advertising environment?

Ad Campaign Research

Ad Campaign Targeted at 20-25 year olds:

Senador Volstead is a beer company based in Spain named after Senator Volstead, who decreed the start of prohibition in 1920. What they have done is created a hidden website, taking advantage of the speak-easy era of drinking in the US, and made it a kind of scavenger hunt to find the true alcohol related website. To find the site, all you have to do is resize your browser window, and it turns into a site that you can buy the beer from. It's an interesting mechanism that plays off of alcohol history to create brand recognition, and a very well designed (and very fun to find) website.

Link: http://www.senadorvolstead.com/eng/#/shop

Ad Campaign Targeted at 30-35 year olds:

In the US, Lowes is a store for homemakers, one that sells furniture and home making goods, such as rugs, and screwdrivers and the like. What Lowes did was create a series of Vine videos, for people that are about the age of their first home (30-35), that shows them tricks and tips on how to make things work well, and how to fix easy problems. The vine videos can be found under #lowesfixinsix, and at the link below:

Link:     http://lowesfixinsix.tumblr.com/

Ad Campaign Targeted at 60-65 year olds:

The senior railcard offered by the National Rail is advertised on its website as a way of visiting family for cheap. The website is easily navigated, something that would be of importance to that age group.


Link: http://www.senior-railcard.co.uk/

Male and Female stereotypes in advertising

Wonderbra - I Can't Cook



Yorkie - It's Just For Men


Clorox - Dads are as smart as house pets

Week 2 Lecture Notes

Commodity Fetishism

About different values of a commodity, and how they effect our view on them.

Use value vs Money Value

Use value is based off how useful an object is. Something with a high use value would be something that you use everyday, like a bicycle or computer.

An object with high money value would be something like a piece of jewelery, or in fact money, which has zero use value, and is 100% based on money value.

The two are balanced when deciding the value and means of advertising a product.