WhiteLabel 🎮 Marketing Games for Businesses

If you are running ads on Meta platform, you likely noticed how ineffective and costly they have become for the past few weeks. This will continue to happen, Google is planning to remove 3rd party cookies in Chrome and Android.

As a replacement, Google will introduce Privacy Sandbox. A similar concept in iOS is allowing or not allowing apps to track. Only 13% of iOS users opt-in to app tracking worldwide. As a marketer or entrepreneur, you may not entirely rely on the effectiveness of Google's Privacy Sandbox.

One solution to this problem is - maintaining a loyal audience base. That means keeping your audience engaged, making your brand reliable to them, and winning their trust.

Your brand needs First-party data. Keeping a direct relationship with customers is a sign that you are not a threat to their privacy. At the same time, you can utilize the relation to collect First-party data reliably to offer personalized experiences and even retarget with ads.

Advergames and gamification strategies help your brand to win audience trust at scale. When they play with your brand elements, that put them directly into the driver's seat. These non-intrusive engagements convert to First-party data.

You can even make these advergame experiences more thrilling with leaderboards and rewards. Your brand will no longer remind your audience of a lifeless ad that they skipped while watching a youtube video.

So when are you ready to collect First-party data at scale with advergames?

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79% of the world's online population engages in one way or another with gaming - according to a Newzoo study. Needless to say, gaming will continue to thrive.

Game-driven marketing strategies are not new. Their potential as a form of ads remains largely unexplored. As a marketer or business owner, you should understand how you can use games to your advantage.

Let me share 5 strategies to run a highly effective gamified marketing campaign.

1. Rewards for playing

Consider including some rewards. It can be discounts, coupons, or high-end rewards like Chipotle included a Tesla Model 3 during their Race to Rewards campaign. The campaign got 71k registered users within 2 days.

2. Social sharing to go viral

KFC Shrimp attack encouraged social sharing. It got 800,000 players within a short time and KFC had to stop the campaign halfway through.

3. A Zombie Survival Machine?

Hyundai in collaboration with The Walking Dead series launched a game Hyundai Chop Shop. The purpose was to let fans modify Hyundai cars to survive a Zombie apocalypse. The game received over a million downloads.

4. Make it competitive

SAP Road Warrior is a simulation advergame to keep their sales team on track. The game is highly competitive in nature with built-in features to challenge other coworkers. The results are then recorded on a ranking list.

5. Keep it simple

Unilever promoted their Magnum ice-cream products with an advergame series Magnum Pleasure Hunt. The games were easy to play with simple and fun storylines. 23 million players played Pleasure Hunt.

Game-driven marketing strategies are powerful when executed properly. Poorly designed advergames or lack of proper planning will not be able to drive desired results.

That being said, consider gamified marketing only when you are ready for high growth or planning to build a brand that your audience love.

How bothered have you been as a consumer seeing all those targeted unsolicited ads from brands that you never interacted with? The good news is, you will soon start seeing your privacy is respected and your consent matters on the internet. That's all. Period.

(Only continue reading if you are a marketer or entrepreneur)

The good ol' days of ads and using 3rd party data are going away. The only way to stay competitive in the coming days will be to keep your customers engaged with your business in a meaningful way - not just treat them as money machines.

It's a good thing too. You will get the opportunity to grow as a brand instead of just another internet business.

What's 3rd party data?

When you browse the web or use apps on your phone, websites and apps collect your data such as name, email, age, etc. They keep track of you using cookies (browsers), IDFA (iOS), and AAID (android).

Later these aggregated data are sold to entities who may not have any direct connection with you or you never gave them consent. That's 3rd party data.

Advertisers can create comprehensive audience segments based on these data to show targeted ads. The process is more complex in general.

Why it matters?

Apple starting from iOS 14.5 made it compulsory that every app needs to display a pop-up asking for the user's consent to get access to IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). It's that small "ask app not to track" that you always click I can guess. A recent survey reported less than 20% of users allow apps to track.

Google is following the privacy route too. They delayed a bit for COVID but not any longer. They are planning to retire both AAID from android and 3rd party cookies from Chrome by 2023.

While consumers love personalized experiences, they absolutely hate tracking. Now it's up to marketers and advertisers either to increase ad budgets or rely more on first-party data to respect privacy but offer personalization.

How first-party data can help?

First-party data is the information you collect from your audience directly. Your audience generally gives their consent and you can reliably engage with them.

In the coming days, to make ads efficient, you would need to attach a first-party data source. Doing so will also help you to portray a complete image of your audience, understand how they interact with your business, and finally communicate with them through personalized messaging.

First-party data is valuable and thus difficult to collect. Being reliable, relevant, and robust - first-party data is often called First-Rate data. A scalable first-party data collection strategy will help to grow your business as a trustworthy brand.

Advergames, lead gen campaigns, content sharing, surveys, etc can help you to collect first-party data at scale. 2nd party data from beneficial partnerships can be helpful too. But all these for another write-up!

#idfa #startup #firstpartydata #ingameadvertising