conference

Social Games Are Glue For Brand Engagement

FarmVille-

Social Gaming panelists at the OMMA Social conference in New York on Thursday said the power of games to get people to engage with brands is driven by the addictive nature of the games, and if they are at the right place, they can have captive audiences who are also willing to share what they learn.

"Thirty percent of viewers of prime time TV are watching with another screen open," said Jay Samit, CEO of SocialVibe. "It's a great medium for storytelling, but why spend money on a Super Bowl ad and then ask people to go find it on YouTube?" He said SocialVibe worked with Kia to drive engagement within Zynga's social games during the last Bowl Game. "We saw three-minute average engagement because they were still playing FarmVille."

Samit said that social gaming is valuable because brands become a gateway to virtual goods or the chance for consumers to engage with a game on a different level. "We call it value exchange," he said. "It used to be that 100% of all advertising was interruptive. Here, it's the opposite. A person has reached a point in the game where they can't progress, so they say, 'Yes, I'll engage with brand.'"

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Richard Muncaster, vice president of corporate strategy for KlickNation, which sells virtual goods for virtual currency, said brand engagement is the rule, not the exception. "Ninety-seven percent of players don't pay."

Samit added that the average engagement time is 63 seconds, and that as many as 40% of consumers then share the experience via social media. "Forty-one percent will 'like' or become fans." He said there are 350 million people playing Zynga and two-thirds of the time spent on Facebook is gaming. "I would go so far as to say that FarmVille and games like that have replaced the soap opera for the working woman who is busy and does not have time to have her own space."

Muncaster, whose company focuses on role-playing games targeting men 25 to 45 years old, says that on average, players engage with games three times per day, for 17 minutes each time.

Samit says brand integration in social games is particularly effective with entertainment properties. "It is eight times better at putting butts in movie seats than any other kind of ad. We found that 40% of those consumers who engaged with a movie in social games went on to buy online tickets. There is also a 30 times better response on social gaming to get people to file taxes."

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