The marketing goals that promotional games are used for are mainly:

• Building brand knowledge (growing awareness of the brand the advergame carries).
• Promoting or launching brands and products.
• Creating brand associations (interaction lets the user link the values the advergame stands for to the brand).
• Brand and product recall (the user’s interaction with the advergame fixes the user experience in memory, so it is remembered over time).
• Raising the advertising pressure, that is the repeated exposure of the audience to the message the advergame carries.
• Reaching a wide range of consumers.
• Building a lasting relationship with the target (loyalty).
• Building a database of potential clients.
• Making what is done on other communication channels more effective.
• Bringing more traffic to the website.

With an advergame you can advertise, communicating what a product or a service is about while entertaining the user at the same time.

The first traces of advergames go back to 1983 and the well-known “Pepsi Invaders”, a clone of Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 sold on cartridges: in the game the invaders are Pepsi logos and the cannon that shoots is the Coca-Cola bottle. In Italy the first advergame was built by Artematica, a software and game studio that made one for a Ferrero campaign. It did so well that in the years after the studio signed a multi-year deal to make Magic Kinder.

According to a New York consultancy, KPE, there are three kinds of advergame, classed by “association, illustration and demonstration”:

Associative advergames

These have a low level of integration and aim mainly to link the brand to be promoted with the setting, the lifestyle or the activity shown in the game. A beach volley game on a hot, crowded beach, for instance, with billboards for a cold drink around the court: the user links heat, beach, sport, fun and thirst to the drink on the billboards. The association works best when the content and the theme of the game reinforce the image of the brand, because that plays on emotion, creating a sensory and emotional involvement.

A very effective associative advergame campaign was the one Jack Daniel’s ran for its 150th anniversary. The game Real Pool, where the “Jack Daniel’s” logo was clearly in the player’s view, aimed to raise brand awareness and the click-through rate to the Jack Daniel’s website. The result was that the site of the whisky maker saw a notable growth in visits, with the click-through rate going from 0.42% to 2.22%.

Illustrative advergames

These are games where the brand becomes the star: the thing to use or to find to finish the game. A practical example is Flip the Mix, the M&Ms game launched in 2002, where the player has to line up the chocolate buttons, scoring for every line completed.

A variant are the goal advergames, where the product is the goal of the game, the thing that gets you to the next level. Getting past a series of obstacles to the entrance of a virtual shop, or putting together an electronic puzzle whose result is the product being promoted, are examples. Here the point is to bring out the final value of the product.

Demonstrative advergames

These are the games classed as satisfying, with a high level of integration, interactivity and involvement between player and product. Demonstrative advergames let the consumer “try” the product virtually, inside the game. An example was the Nike game with Vince Carter, where the player becomes the basketball champion and can test how the new shoes perform during a match.

Demonstrative advergames are the most complete — and the most expensive. They also have to be as simple as possible, so that the people playing do not leave them because they are too hard or too complex.

Now that you have read this article, are you interested in making an advergame too? Get in touch, with no commitment, and we will find the solution that fits you best.