Mobile Gaming vs. Social Shopper Engagement

After a few weeks of tooling around the West Coast for a variety of strategic partner and technology meetings, it’s crystal clear that Silicon Valley understands the addictive, transformative power of mobile gaming coupled with social media. From the Zynga billboards on Rt. 101, to the omnipresent coffee shop conversationalists ruminating on Angry Birds, to the emerging social media seminars at Stanford’s Professional Journalism Fellowships program, mobile-social gaming fever has reached epidemic proportions (not to mention the gazillions of venture coins feverishly being put to work in the space).

What’s less clear is whether many of the mobile gaming companies on the West Coast understand the concerns and challenges facing Madison Avenue’s traditional (and integrated digital) advertising agencies; or whether they even care… Specifically, there’s a large, and seemingly growing, disconnect between the game design process, user acquisition strategies, and monetization methods when compared to the marketing objectives of most large brands. Scale (in terms of reaching more than just early-adopters at the top of the technology food chain), brand account manageability, and campaign integration are all but ignored by most game developers.

Use Pongr to turn your existing brand creative & store assets into a dynamic mobile and social marketing channel that showcases the visual value of your brand.

Many mobile-social media plays are no longer complimentary advertising channels, despite their runaway market success, due to the vast psychological divide between being in purchase intent mode (passive or active) and being in game mode. Effectively influencing consumer purchase decisions is hard — as is engineering addiction. Adding a game component to your mobile marketing arsenal can be a great brand-building exercise, but it’s still critical that the concepts remain tightly focused on YOUR brand and YOUR objectives vs. a game-for-the-sake-of-the-game approach.

There’s a strong possibility that as non-advertising revenues soar for a number of gaming companies (think virtual goods, digital goods, and feature subscription plans), more and more developers will totally ignore the advertising space. For the vanguard of virtual goods creators, there are monumental new business opportunities to tap. However, for brand marketers, it’s going to get tougher before it gets easier to execute transmedia strategies, tighter integration between traditional, digital and scalable mobile marketing.

There are lots of cool and interesting mobile-social branding experiences available, but not many that deliberately activate advertising assets like point-of-sale, TV spots, out-of-home, product packaging or print — AND make the mobile activation experience work for greater than 15-20% of the market (i.e., QR code fragmentation and confusion among a standard-less, confusing activation method).

Mobile engagement with social game playing shoppers means you need be playful, easy-to-use, widely available, yet steadfast in your objectives to deliver appropriate messaging. There’s a simple way to make mobile social gaming work for your brand marketing objectives: PONGR.

We’re focused on helping brands leverage existing marketing spend in both traditional and digital. Pongr is the only mobile-social gaming company that understands the brand advertising requirements, as well as has the technology delivery and support capabilities to scale as much as your global brand needs.

Pongr can quickly enable you to:

• Turn existing brand images (logos, ads, TV commercials, etc.) into a “clickable” on-ramp to mobile.
• Add a gaming element to your mobile marketing that includes Facebook and Twitter.
• Create an automated, scalable personal dialogue with shoppers based on their expressed interests.
• Measure the effectiveness of your various traditional spending outlets.
• Report on critical engagement metrics like location, brand sentiment, demographics, and social reach.

If you’re ready to get started on a Pongr mobile marketing and image recognition campaign, visit our self-service Campaign Manager. Or, contact a sales representative if you have any questions!

Pongr designs, develops, markets and supports a range of mobile marketing solutions for global brands. Our expertise in image recognition, product packaging activation, brand game strategy and scalable visual search technologies can be applied to your next break-through advertising campaign.