Blog covering all aspects of Internet marketing including search optimization & marketing, email marketing, blog marketing, video marketing, social network marketing, SMS marketing & online pr.
This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.
I was a guest on The Loop, a segment of G4 TV's Attack of the Show video game program. The segment aired on the 24th and it addressed the MySpace Primary. They asked me to be a guest because of my role as co-publisher of Politics In Minnesota and because I cover online politics quite a bit.
The other guest was Sarah Wheaton, a political reporter and blogger for the New York Times. The host is Kevin Pereira. The appearance was a bit of a treat for me because I'm a fan of the show and, though we didn't talk video games, I'm a fan of G4 TV's video game channel, as well.
Mercury News reports today that Microsoft will release a scaled-down version of it's video game development tools to the wider public at an extremely affordable $99.00 price point in order to build up a community of video game developers for it's Xbox 360 console much as YouTube has aggregated a huge community of do-it-yourself video producers.
The software, XNA Game Studio Express, has the promise of creating a huge community of modders, such as that which exists for video games on the PC platform, but will also allow users to provide their games for fee or free through the Xbox 360 microtransaction platform, Xbox Live Marketplace. The software will allow users to create games for both the PC and Xbox 360 simultaneously.
The software obviously serves Microsoft's needs in it's competition against Sony and Nintendo in the next-generation video game console battle. But the extremely low price point for Microsoft's development software also creates a huge new opportunity for small businesses to experiment with an entirely new marketing platform with very little barrier to entry.
The possibility now exists for even mom and pop shops to create an immersive brand experience or practical, hands-on virtual product demonstrations.
Last year I discussed how Video Game Tournaments Point to A Future Mass Medium, if console makers offer an audience or spectator mode for online video game play.
Last week, GameDaily BIZ reported that Microsoft's 5,000th patent "covers technologies that will be featured in Xbox 360 games, brings new innovation to online gaming by allowing consumers to tune into a video game much as they would a sporting event broadcast."
Indeed, video games such as "Star Wars: Battlefront II" and "Dead or Alive 4" already offer such a feature but the execution is not quite ready for primetime. The game "Project Gotham Racing 3" has a Gotham TV feature in which the spectator mode works quite well simply because the nature of a racing game lends itself far more naturally to a televised event-type experience.
The fact that Microsoft has filed a patent for virtual spectator sport means they at least recognize it as a potentially lucrative technology.
Curtis Wong, senior program manager with the Next Media Research Group in Microsoft Research, was quoted in the GameDaily BIZ article, saying "I have a vision of really large numbers of people watching tournaments online. The top players could become as famous as sports stars, even endorsing products. This could really help gaming move into the mainstream."
Virtual spectator sport will come to pass and I'm guessing that it will be enormously successful as a pay-per-view service, as well as an advertising and product placement vehicle.
Technorati tags: video games | nextgen | microsoft | xbox 360 | online gaming | virtual spectator sport | star wars battlefront ii | dead or alive 4 | project gotham racing 3 | gotham tv
This sure smells like a viral marketing campaign. First there was news of an Origami Project website, then there were pictures of Microsoft's alleged handheld video game console slash mobile computing device, and now a video promo of the device at YouTube and Google Video.
The device is apparently Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod Video, Sony's PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo's DS with a bunch of other stuff thrown in for good measure. I'm inclined to believe the gadget is legit because it makes a ton of business sense for Microsoft to have it's own handheld entertainment device/mobile computing platform, especially considering how wildly successful the iPod Video has been and the strong sales the portable video game consoles from Sony and Nintendo.
Regardless of how this viral campaign shakes out, though, the following video is the best demonstration I've yet seen of where ubiquitous, mobile computing is headed and thus where online mobile marketing must inevitably follow:
Technorati tags: viral marketing | origami project | origami project video | video | microsoft | apple | ipod | ipod video | sony | playstation portable | psp | nintendo | nintendo ds | handheld | video games | mobile marketing | online video | google video | youtube
Charles Schwab Commercial Target Market
Charles Schwab knows that video games are mainstream: Witness their latest television spots.
The latest TV campaign by Charles Schwab caught my eye from the moment I first saw one of the spots. The animated ads use a technique called rotoscoping, which I first remember seeing employed in Ralph Bakshi's 1978 film version of Lord Of The Rings. A more recent example of rotoscoping can be seen in A-Ha's 1985 music video, Take On Me.
In rotoscoping, animators trace live action frame by frame to use as the foundation of their animations. But it was not the rotoscoping technique of the Schwab ad that arrested my attention, but rather the style. The spots have a very distinctive style, which I'd seen before.
In Grand Theft Auto. See for yourself in the comparison below. On the left is a screenshot from one of the Schwab ads and on the right is a detail from one of the initial loading screens of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
I think the styles are just too similar to be a coincidence. Slate's Seth Stevenson offers his take on the ads and agrees with me that the visual style is arresting but then goes all esoteric by explaining that the cartoony feel washes "out the real-world details present in a live actor's face, and in an actual background set, lets us move past what we're seeing and shifts our attention onto the dialogue."
Perhaps. I think it more likely, though, that the novelty of this type of animation in an ad is simply a way to accomplish a television ad's biggest obstacle: Gaining the initial attention of the viewer.
In that it succeeds but by looking so much like the art style of Grand Theft Auto, I believe these spots are deliberately targeted on the 24 to 45 male demographic which is getting increasingly harder to reach for the very reason that they spend more and more of their time playing video games at the expense of television viewing.
Charles Schwab Commercials [MPEG Video]
Xbox 360 sales are not what they could be and Microsoft has only itself to blame.
The marketing of Microsoft's next-generation video game console, the Xbox 360, may go down in marketing history as a textbook example of how to drive your customers directly to the feet of your primary competitor.
What makes the failure of the Xbox 360 launch so stunning is that it was executed by Microsoft, a company with abundant marketing savvy.
Microsoft launched their marketing campaign with a bit of buzz marketing in the form of the mysterious Our Colony web site. They continued by drip drip dripping a drop of Xbox 360 info here and a dash of Xbox 360 news there through various video game sites and techology events. Photos were leaked. The technical specifications of the box were revealed.
Soon enough they'd whipped the public into such a frenzy that they had to start qualifying some of the launch expectations: Due to their global launch, there would be shortages.
But once they announced that consumers could expect shortages, they had to deal with conspiracy theories positing that Microsoft was creating scarcity in order to amp up demand.
Not that I wouldn't put it past Microsoft, but I never really bought the idea. Microsoft is gunning for market leader, Sony, who will likely launch their own next-generation system, the PlayStation 3, in Spring 2006. The idea of launching before Sony was to lock people in to Microsoft's next-gen system. The Xbox 360 is also costing Microsoft more to make than their asking price; they have an obvious interest in recouping those costs in volume and in software sales, which are clearly useless if you don't have a console with which to play them.
The reasons Xbox 360 shortages are not in Microsoft's interests are too numerous to mention here, but for a superbly done piece on the subject, see the L.A. Times' Michael Hiltzik's Golden State blog.
Not only did Microsoft screw up their launch by failing to meet demand, the stories of shortages no doubt had the effect of driving up demand through the considerable influence of Johnny expecting an Xbox 360 beneath the Christmas tree.
So what's a desperate parent to do when they can't get their hands on the hottest item of the season and don't want to bid for upwards of $900 Xboxes on eBay? As Christmas approached, I noticed more and more electronics departments with only one or two Sony PlayStation Portables in stock.
You figure Dad can't disappoint Johnny, so with no 360 to be had, the kid's disappointment would surely be erased if he got coolest portable gaming system this season. And at a $250 price point, Dad can save a couple hundred in the process. At the end of the day, Microsoft has closed the deal for Sony.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that PSP sales rose precipitously as a directl result of Xbox 360 shortages. Sony seems to be anticipating just such a scenario.
Data from two new surveys will help inform teen marketing strategies. The data from Forrester Reseach and BIGResearch provide insight into online teen marketing strategies.
Forrester's latest survey of Canadian and US teen consumers (21-21 years of age) reveals that more than two-thirds of of them own PCs, DVD players, home stereos, mobile phones or handheld devices and a quarter of them own MP3 players and camera- or Internet-connected or phones. Teens are overwhelmingly gamers, with more than 90% owning a gaming device, and three-quarters playing games (both online and offline) on their computer.
Forester found that teens spent an average of 11 hours per week online, compared to the 8.5 hours their adult counterparts spent online per week. Nearly 80% of teens visit games sites, close to 50% visit movie web sites and more than a third visit music sites.
An effective way of reaching these teens, then, would be through in-game advertising, advergaming, or by advertising on gaming web sites.
Finally, Forrester found that approximately half of 12 to 21 year-olds get purchase advice from their friends and family, and 65% tell others what products they like. That's seconded by a BIGResearch survey of 18 to 24 year-olds that found that Word of Mouth was the most influential media for making electronic purchases, followed by TV, Magazines, and the Internet.
These finding reinforce the point I made in my last post about online fashion marketing that online marketing aimed at teens needs to incorporate the technologies with which they are fluent.
One of the primary things we do for clients is conduct keyword research to determine the exact search phrases people are using to find information about their product or service.
After compiling a list of relevant search phrases, we analyze the list for volume of searches (popularity), intent (search mode: is the searcher an information seeker?, in purchase mode? etc.), and efficacy (how likely is it that we will have success using that phrase for search engine marketing given the competition and other factors?).
Recent data from Hitwise on "xbox 360" searches will give you an idea of searcher's behavior. Hitwise released the following list of "Top 10 Sites receiving traffic from the search term "xbox 360" - based on volume of searches" for the four weeks ending 12/10/2005. The following list indicates which web sites got what share of traffic from the search phrase "xbox 360."
| 1. | Xbox.com | 22.09% |
| 2. | Microsoft.com | 6.54% |
| 3. | news.google.com | 5.08% |
| 4. | eBay.com | 4.77% |
| 5. | Atomicpark.com | 4.14% |
| 6. | xbox360.ign.com | 2.53% |
| 7. | MSN.com | 2.29% |
| 8. | Shoplocal.com | 1.98% |
| 9. | Bizrate.com | 1.95% |
| 10. | Walmart.com | 1.83% |
Based on the top 10 sites that people chose to go to after searching for "xbox 360," we determine several things. The top 10 sites can be divided into two general categories: informational and ecommerce. The preponderance of the searches were informational, with most people going to Microsoft-owned sites Xbox.com, Microsoft.com and MSN.com. That's unsurprising, given that the Xbox 360 is a Microsoft product. We also know that a subset of the information seekers looked specifically for news about the Xbox 360 because of the traffic to Google's news search engine and the traffic to the video game web site published by IGN.
The remaining sites are ecommerce-related. Even if we hadn't seen the news about Xbox 360 shortages, we could have gotten a hint that there were shortages because eBay was the top ecommerce site people visited. Why would people buy a product at a site where the price is not fixed unless supplies were scarce?
Atomic Park is primarily a software site but also sells Xbox 360s, so their traffic is probably a combination of people wanting to buy the actual console and people looking for information on Xbox 360 games.
Bizrate is a price comparison search engine, so the traffic to that site consists of people looking for a deal.
Shoplocal, as the name implies, is a site where you can find stores near you and, so, their traffic is fairly self-explanatory: Those people are trying to find a store in their neighborhood where they can buy an Xbox 360. The same might be said for Walmart, one of the official Xbox 360 retailers, because they have a store locator on their site.
Finally, when you look at the Xbox 360 searches in the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.com, you'll notice that the ecommerce sites are not listed in the "natural" search engine results but that they are heavy advertisers in the sponsored sections of the search results page. That tells us that most, if not all, of their traffic is coming from pay-per-click search engine advertising.
Back when details of the Xbox 360 first started leaking out, one of the rumors suggested that the next-gen video game console would include an "audience" mode for its Xbox Live online service.
Too bad it was just a rumor. The rumor rang true because it makes perfect financial sense.
Why, after all, did Microsoft get into the video game business? Because it posed a threat to their plan to make their franchise, the Windowns operating system, the engine of the home entertainment system. The Xbox 360 will be able to communicate with Windows XP Media Center. Video games are also, happily for Microsoft, an increasingly lucrative new market in which to compete, so they are not simply defending their existing dominance of the operating system market, but creating another cash cow in this new market.
By placing themselves in the middle of the home entertainment infrastructure of the future, Microsoft could not only dominate the interactive entertinment market, but create a new medium that strongly resembles the television model: A mass market passive entertainment format.
An audience mode could potentially turn video games into a mass market passive entertainment medium that could be a mass advertising vehicle that rivals television.
A recent Associated Press story illustrates that potential.
The story reports that video game tournments--events where games meet in massive numbers to compete against one another--are becoming so popular that organizers say they are becoming the next spectator sport: "Only about 4,000 spectators showed up at the Hammerstein [event in New York], organizers said, but more than 63,000 followed the games live on the Web," the story reports.
Given the popularity of the National Football League, it takes little imagination that it's virtual equivalent could garner mass spectator appeal. Games such as Halo and Halo 2 are built specifically to take advantage of online competition. It's not a stretch to imagine Halo enthusiasts paying for a pay-per-view event of competition among the top 10 Halo gamers.
I think it's only a matter of time before the video game industry figures out that they can cash in on not just gamers, but the audience their competition can create.
In 1994, the neo-punk band Green Day broke onto the popular music scene with their album Dookie, several songs from which enjoyed quite a bit of airtime on radio stations nationwide. Since then, the band has not enjoyed simliar commecial success until last year's run-away success, American Idiot. That success could very well be due in no small part to their decision to debut the title track on Electronic Arts' franchise video game, Madden NFL 2005.
EA has sold more than 43 million units of the video game worldwide, 6 million of which were the 2005 version. No wonder, then, that the game's popularity, especially among 18-to-34-year-old males, has become a high-profile platform from which to introduce new music and new bands.
Madden NFL 06 is no exception. this year's version includes established acts such as the Foo Fighters and Godsmack as well as serveral songs that are exclusive releases for the game. See the full soundtrack at Madden06.com.
According to an NFL Network show, The Making of Madden (watch part 1 and part 2, Steve Schnur, EA's Vice President of Music, says that approximately 2,500 to 3,000 bands are considered for Electronic Arts titles and that the bands are coming to them from all over the world, lobbying to be included in their games. "At the end of the day, I hear band after band after band from years past say they go to show after show and kids come up to them and say, 'Dude, the first time I heard you was in Madden,'" Schnur continued. David Draiman of the band Distrubed, says "Every band out there needs to start considering what video games and the whole format can do for them."
The fact that video games are played over and over again, make them the ideal substitute for the radio airplay they displace.
AdAge.com has an interesting story from last week on the impact that the Grand Theft Auto video game controversy will have on the new in-game advertising industry. AdAge.com says that product placement within games--"advergaming"--currently a $180 billion market, is expected to grow to $800 million by 2009.
The article airs worries that the advergaming market could be stunted because the controversy of GTA: San Andreas will scare off advertisers.
I don't quite buy the logic because, as is laid out in the very same article, companies are increasingly desperate to reach what the story calls the "lost boys," 18 to 34 year-old men who have largely abandoned televsion in favor of their Xboxes and Play Stations. Video games present a ready-made platform to reach these "lost boys."
If anything, the article highlights the challenges marketers face in a world of time-shifted media and increasingly fragmented audiences.
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