[arg_discuss] The (Marketing) Effects Of Alternate Reality Games

[Brian Clark]

>So they're looking for new communication channels steadily to

>commercialize their products or services. An ARG seems to be

>a suitable tool for this.


Maybe, maybe not. It is a form of branded entertainment, which is actually
an old tactic in advertising. 


>The interactivity of the game and the high involvement of the

>players shall award a strong effect to the communication strategy.


But for a disproportionally small segment of the total audience. Heist was
trying to sell cars directly to the people running mission for Nisha.


>ARGs are produced effortfully and can get very expensive. 


Not really: expensive is a relative term in advertising or entertainment.
They are still "small to moderate" budget projects for the most part in the
advertising space.


>In most of the cases the product, service or company isn't announced

>in the game phase. (Ok, not in The Art of the H3eist ;-) ) 


Actually, it is almost always announced in the game phase or before the game
phase, it is far more rare for the sponsor to be completely hidden until
post game.


>You can read on the internet that this form of advertising is

>unimportant for them and they're playing the ARG because alone

>the fun counts.


Soap opera and home improvement television show viewers would say the same
thing: that's the heart of a branded entertainment strategy.


>Is there really an effect and how can this effect be proved? Are

>there any reliable and adequate measuring instruments to shows a ARG is

>an instrument of the brand communication of marketing objectives defined 

>for the attainment works? 


Short answer: Yes. You used one of the magic words ("marketing objectives")
and Ivan used one of the other magic words ("correlation"). This requires a
bit of social sciences statistics and experiment modeling, but you can
almost always rely upon "before the ARG" or "non-ARG channel marketing" as a
control group for comparison. Difference from a statistical point of view is
that your sample size will tend to be gigantic compared to other social
statistical models (because most of your data sources will be exhaustive
instead of extrapolated samples.)

Personally I think there are a few clear psychological tendencies at play on
what produces the results (like the availability heuristic and the
propinquity effect), but the marketing goals (and the familiar metrics they
already use to measure that) are always the most important to prove
correlated to your efforts. Find the bell they want rung, and ring that
bell:

http://www.revenews.com/brianclark/rocks-ripples-buzz/
http://www.revenews.com/brianclark/math-teachers-are-laughing-at-us-right-no
w/
http://www.revenews.com/brianclark/why-people-are-gaming-your-system/



>Sure, you can measure all that quantity stuff 

>like blogposts, wikis, newsarticles, etc. or could you the net promoter 

>score... But there has to be more...


None of those things are necessarily predictive of or correlated to their
marketing goal, though, are they? They are intermediary metrics: one could
imagine even an ARG that scored low on all of those intermediary metrics
(say, because it was primarily a mobile or real-world platform) and still
accomplish the goal, right?


Brian