Volkswagen have created a wonderful piece of what they call “social marketing” but which anybody familiar with gaming for the past thirty years would just call “gaming”.
At Head First we pursue work where we can make a difference; where we know that our ideas would be appropriate. Sometimes this takes us outside the games industry and the usual response is “where’s your relevance?”. I never struggle to find an answer.
I say something like games brings everybody together. To which I am told that the client isn’t a gamer.
I don’t believe them.
Everybody is a gamer.
They might not consider buying Modern Warfare 2 or Bioshock 2; they might not even own a “games machine”; but they are gamers.
The rise in what is commonly called social media has gaming built in as standard. Look at your friend’s Facebook updates and a game won’t be far away, clearly VW understand this.
Games unite people. Games teach people and games blaze the trail in terms of user experiences and technical accomplishments.
And if everybody is a gamer then it follows that there are certain elements they have in common; certain elements that can be used to reach them.
VW’s boast centres around the fact that their promotion had been downloaded over four million times. The “revelation” of their claim is supposed to be that all this was achieved without spending a penny on media. However, when you understand the power of gaming the revelation, however brilliant, isn’t surprising.
I was excited when the Wii was announced (and remain so to this day) but Natal is something else entirely. A hands-free approach to gaming which can change everything.
At Head First, where we strive to find what is exciting about any product, that’s something to sit up and pay attention to.
What’s more exciting, however, is how Microsoft are beginning to crank up the interest in it.
On Wednesday, Sony issued a press release to inform the world that their version of the Wii motion sensor was delayed. For those of you who aren’t glued to video games, Sony are entering the same market as Nintendo Wii motion and Microsoft’s Natal system. Their answer, announced last year will arrive in the form of a wand device which would be tracked by cameras similar to those on the Nintendo Wii.
On its own that would have been impressive.
But then Microsoft blew everyone out of the water with Natal. If that were me, I’d have taken my wand home and sulked for a while, muttering about not being understood.
To their credit, Sony haven’t done that and without getting a hands-on experience I can’t tell whether it won’t be even more successful than Natal. I certainly hope it competes because I love what Sony does.
So what’s exciting about Microsoft’s approach?
Apart from the technology, which sounds amazing, it comes down to Wednesday and Sony’s press release.
Microsoft took their time, all of a handful of hours, and responded with a bold claim about Natal.
This is a great thing to say. Put yourself in a movie for a minute and listen to the dialogue when two heroes are faced with an almost impossible situation. They think of a plan. “It’s risky, ” they say, “but it might just work”.
That’s what Microsoft have effectively done. Showing great confidence in their product by making claims to the contrary.
It sounds like they aren’t going in quiet on this one.
Following on from my earlier entry on celebrity endorsements for advertising I’d like to focuss on one particular product area: fragrances.
I can’t help but notice that TV ad time is swamped with star-studded endorsements for – The Fragrance (the last resort Xmas present). Ad-slots have heated up despite the snow with James Franco, Vincent Cassell, Josh Harnett, Ewan McGregor, Kiera Knightly, Nichol Kidman, Kate Moss, Beyonce all doing their utmost to convince us to buy the scent they represent.
Actually they are not doing their utmost, in fact they are doing very little but it’s better than just featuring the actual companies behind the product. Yet, is this really the best way to convince the public to buy their fragrance above all others? Especially when (conceptually) they are all the same.
I don’t blame the creatives or the agencies behind the ads; anyone in the ad biz knows the best ideas never get chosen but let’s face it, there’s not even the slightest attempt to stand out.
I get it though. Buy the smell and you’re buying into the glamor of the worlds inhabited by these celebs. Hell, it’s worked in the past and the wisdom here seems to say that if it aint broke… I just thought that maybe the consumer these days was slightly more knowledgeable and cynical about advertising to fall for that old one.
You would think though, that if this is the time of year when sales peak then surely the arena is more competitive.
So why be the same as your rivals?
There is a great opportunity to stand out and be memorable but I smell a rat. Playing safe seems to be the order of the day and in these times of accountability a good defense for decision makers is “well they do it, so why don’t we?”. Safety in numbers and all that.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they all smell the same, and so the ads are all the same. It could be an honest approach to advertising.
Good creativity is full of risk. But such a direction seems to be in direct contradiction to the message of despair and cynicism that currently prevails. Steve Henry of HHCL questions the use of celebrities in advertising during a time of recession saying, whilst acknowledging the escapism value of such strategies, that they don’t represent the best way of talking to people. Rich people advertising cheap food – where’s the connection between brand and consumer there?
Celebrity based advertising (generally speaking) is just one of those fallback positions for Creatives. They are easy propositions which show conservatism in full swing. The reasoning seems to be that by shoe-horning Celebrity D into Brand A there is no risk, or at least a reduced risk. There is a degree of truth to that. Safe advertising done well can be effective, of course it can, and wild, risky ideas can fail miserably. I’m sure Gillette’s “star-studded” tour de force may well have sales to back up its strategy.
More often than not this form of advertising, whether it is stapling Richard Hammond to a supermarket trolley or forcing Ant and Dec into other people’s made-up lives, has to remain true to the basics of good advertising and use their celebrities for solid, persuasive reasons and not because they are flavour of the month or, worse still, flavour of the marketing exec’s better half.
This project has been one of the most interesting of the year, not because of the game (which looks fabulous) but because of what it represents.
Video games, generally speaking, are written by “developers” and then published by “publishers” in much the same way as authors and publishers generally work. Big publishers such as THQ, Capcom, EA etc are great at bringing games to market. They provide an expertise of marketing but also they provide the funds necessary to get it, well, published. It takes a lot of money to fund games these days. A lot of money to keep the developer going, a lot to pay out to the makers of the console and then a lot to market it to as wide an audience as possible.
But things are changing.
The easiest example of this taking place can be seen on the App Store (Apple’s online store for it’s iPhone applications). These are beginning to be created and released by tiny teams with virtually no marketing budget. They have a willing audience who are looking to purchase and, for the most part, rely on the brilliance of their design as their best advertisement.
The technology involved means that this approach, for now, is possible.
And it is being followed by other consoles such as XBox Marketplace and PlayStation Network. Increasing numbers of people are opting to buy direct via digital download rather than through traditional retails.
But the rush to digital marketplaces and the compartive ease by which products can be created means that there is now an awful lot of products are being released.
Apple make this a bragging point – something like 100,000 apps are now available through them.
But turn it around and say you have one of the 100,000 apps. You are faced with a problem.
You need to make your product stand out.
Because increasingly we are seeing the big brands make it to the front page. So Jamie Oliver’s cooking app is up there and it’s there not because it’s the best cooking app in the world but because it is easily recognised. It’s a brand.
Which leaves lots of cooking apps, like the one my Mum might write, going cold. Not because they are worse, but because we live in a world where big brands are pushed over better products.
So my Mum now needs to make her cooking app which will actually stir your sauce for you*, stand out.
Which means, well, marketing.
And those one person developer teams might be able to do that on their own or they might need create a streamlined marketing process.
Relentless Software are doing this with Blue Toad Murder Files and Head First have been proud to work on it with them. For us it shows what a knowledgeable agency can do to help make a point of difference because, unlike in the days where all you had to do was place a print ad in a specialist magazine, now you have different issues. Bringing games to market in the era of digital downloads is just as challenging as it was in the days of those old fashioned things called shops.
These days you might not know where your consumer is. They might not be browsing the sites you think they are browsing. They might be watching TV whilst texting. They might be using Messenger whilst listening to the radio.
So you need to be clever. Or cleverer. You need to create advertising which can be passed on. Which is fun and entertaining in its own right and which has a message which can be adapted to suit the medium.
I’m going to let you into a secret. It’s one of the best kept secrets in marketing. This may come as a shock. OK, here it is: the video game industry is a global business. It is worth more than movies and, well, the marketing people who promote each product under its banner aren’t playing. They know what they do isn’t playing, it’s business.
As a global business, the marketing side of video games must be targeted, strategic and fiscally responsible. It falls to other businesses, businesses such as Head First to promote and sell the products at a global level. If the product is big enough then the effort must rival that of any Hollywood blockbuster. This was true of Resident Evil 5, it was true of Guitar Hero and it was true of Modern Warfare 2. If you work in marketing then you could probably add another half dozen titles to that list from the Christmas period alone.
What constitutes ‘global’, however, varies from title to title. Each territory may have its own sub-strategy. Imagery may vary from country to country as local brand managers look to personalise the marketing and take into account local customs, local personalities or local trends. Sometimes this is the right way to go.
There are, of course, complications in this approach. The Internet has made this vast world of ours vastly smaller. When it comes to the release of media, many consumers are subjected to marketing from all four corners depending upon their browsing habits. Whilst many if the big magazine portals are canny enough to target content and advertising at a local level, things happen, stuff leaks and people share the high points and low points of ad campaigns.
This isn’t true just for video games of course, in fact it’s probably less true for video games. For movies, sites enjoy sharing the local marketing efforts as they look for the best creative across the world.
The Internet brings us all together and we can’t have one bad apple letting the side down. In many ways there is no ‘local’ any more.
When we approached MotoGP, a campaign slated for full bloom next year but which has already begun this year, we took the decision to think about what it means to market at a global level. We were used to delivering campaigns globally; many video game campaigns operate on a very centralised approach – create one key message, one set of key assets and then roll it out. Tweak locally where necessary. For MotoGP, however, this approach needed refining because of the nature of motor-sports.
Motor-sports aren’t as big a phenomenon in the UK or the US as they are in, say, Spain or Italy. It wasn’t a question of creating key assets and then tweaking locally by placing a key rider on the cover for some countries. The campaign needed to think a little cleverer than that. It had to look at where the real passion for the sport emanated from, where the real excitement was; and then it had to convey that to the rest of the world.
It is the same approach when tackling any modern, global brief. It’s not enough to fit vaguely into a set of brand values any more, allowing local marketing their own idiosyncracies. But nor is it acceptable to force a centralised message from one country on the rest of the world. The marketing has to be cleverer. It has to be grown-up.
In some ways, the video game business is still trapped in the body of a twelve year old. It still sometimes thinks and acts as a series of separate, unconnected businesses. Brands often start and then end with the product itself and that cannot be right for such a big, such a global business. In the years ahead that will probably change but for now, for product marketing making local global is the key. We need to go further and think deeper.
I’m looking for something special. Around me are the hills of Grasmere and I have my nose in a dusty old bookshop that rarely discounts, barely organises and never, ever, sells stamps.
The hills ought to be enough. Their splendour is clear and painters and poets could lead me by the hand through every life, every unique life, which has been caught in their shadow.
Instead I turn to another country as a book by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame) shows me not the majestic beauty of Wordsworth but the ordinary lives of a tiny collection of people in a Swedish hamlet. And it is this sense of the ordinary that most captivates me because it is something I strive for whenever I write or whenever I start my working day.
Take this sentence:
People woke up late because there was no longer any morning.
How ordinary. How extraordinary. In context it is a simple sentence relating the behaviour of people caught in the long darkness of winter. This is Sweden, remember. A simple sentence gives us a simple behaviour and a complex insight into the people who exhibit it.
From the ordinary activity of sleeping in late to the extraordinary people who do so, there is always something more in every detail.
Facing the onset of a digital world is difficult for any brand but for a product built around the tactile joy of real-world building it must have been a challenge to dwarf the scale usually adopted by devotees of Lego. Read more…
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Volkswagen have created a wonderful piece of what they call “social marketing” but which anybody familiar with gaming for the past thirty years would just call “gaming”.
but let’s face it, there’s not even the slightest attempt to stand out.
Facing the onset of a digital world is difficult for any brand but for a product built around the tactile joy of real-world building it must have been a challenge to dwarf the scale usually adopted by devotees of Lego. 
