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♔ INCORPORATING GAME MECHANICS INTO TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING

Gamification is the use of game-thinking and game mechanics in order to engage users, improve and enhance the user engagement, experience, ROI, data quality, timeliness, and learning.  Early examples of gamification are based on giving reward points to people who share experiences on location-based platforms such as Facebook's "Place" feature, Foursquare, and Gowalla. Some of the techniques include achievement "badges" or “levels”, leaderboards, a progress bar or any other visual meter to indicate how close people are to completing a task, virtual currency systems for awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting, and otherwise exchanging points challenges between users embedding small casual games within other activities. 

Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies, and is not to be confused with traditional sequels or adaptations.  From a production standpoint, it involves creating unique content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives.  In order to achieve this engagement, stories need to developed across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique (co-dependent) pieces of content in each channel.  Importantly, these pieces of content are linked together (overtly or subtly) in narrative synchronization with each other.  Transmedia storytelling most importantly uses different medias (at what they are best at) to each tell only one part of a larger interrelated narrative.

 Integrating Game Mechanics into Your Story

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"The Next Level" – Nike Football's Branded Utility

While Nike had been gaining traction in soccer for years, it had been losing traction with advanced players, who tended to gravitate toward rivals such as Adidas as they moved into more-serious competition. The 2008 European Championships presented just the opportunity to change this perception.  Note:  This campaign is a few years old now, but would work as well today as the day it was launched.  Great ideas are great ideas.  Period.

What resulted was the kind of campaign (by 72andSunny) that proved that it doesn't take a big footprint to do great work that delivers results.  Moreover, this is also exactly what we mean when we talk about branded content and utility - brands creating something that is participatory and useful/valuable to their customers.

The centerpiece of the program was a striking, fast-paced two-minute film directed by Guy Richie, which shows one athlete's first-person view of taking his game to a higher and higher level (first person POV complete with pre-match vomiting and requests for autographs).

Taking the self improvement theme further, an online "boot camp" based on Nike's site provided video-based advanced training and skills regiments. The short film by Guy Ritchie featured superstars such as Cesc Fabregas, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo showing off dazzling skills, but positioned in the context of all the training it takes to get to the next level.

RESULTS
The effort drove 50 million unique visitors to Nike's site in six months, a total that doesn't include external websites such as YouTube, where one posting of Ritchie's film has drawn more than 4.2 million views. Print and outdoor executions focused on specific elite skills, and challenged readers as to whether they had them while also prominently referring them to the Nikefootball.com website.

McDonald's FarmVille Promotion - Brands and Social Gaming

Electronic Arts recently (Sept.14th, 2010) revealed results from a study conducted by The Nielsen Company, which shows the degree to which brand advertisements within video games can boost real life sales.  The study, commissioned by EA on behalf of Gatorade, shows that in-game advertising increased household dollars spent on Gatorade by 24%, and offered a return on investment of $3.11.  Gatorade had a variety of product placements within EA games including arena signs, players' water bottles, score updates and other call outs.

With social networks permeating our daily lives, entertainment is being redefined and is going back to its roots.  It’s getting social again.  Social games already alter the way people use Facebook .  Gamers stick around longer, use more of their online time on Facebook, and log in more regularly.  Facebook Connect will only make things even more pervasive.

Case in point - McDonald’s just created a branded farm on Farmville in a special one day event. Essentially, McDonald’s will become a “Neighbour Farm” to every player in the world for a day, this allows players to come and work on the McDonald’s Farmville Farm, helping to grow things like tomatoes and mustard seeds.  Players will be rewarded with all sorts of virtual McCafe items that allow them to grow their own farms twice as fast! Plus, they also get a McDonald’s hot air balloon flyover for their efforts.

The exposure is seriously huge for McDonald’s, who gains almost instant exposure and potential brand interaction to the near seventy (70) million active Farmville players around the world. The only other brand to have partnered with Farmville was Microsoft’s Bing earlier this year.

Advertainment is a relatively new form of advertising medium that blurs conventional distinctions between what constitutes advertising and what constitutes entertainment. Branded content is essentially a fusion of the two into one product intended to be distributed as entertainment content, albeit with a highly branded quality. Advertainment, unlike conventional forms of entertainment content, is generally funded entirely by a brand or corporation rather than, for example, a Movie studio or a group of producers. However, it can be argued that this is just a new name for the same type of marketing that was pioneered by soap manufacturers in the early days of radio and television with the soap opera.  What do you think?

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