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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com My name is Daniel Rolls, and in this episode we're talking about gamification for digital marketing. Okay, this is going to be a podcast of two halves. So first of all, I have some of the latest insights and stats of why gamification is probably more important than ever in digital marketing. And we'll look at a load of different gamification techniques. And then next we're going to move an interview where we look at the other side of this actually using games for gamification, since about 30% of the world's population actually play digital games of some description. And I'm going to be joined by Luke from playspark, who specializes in branded interactive games. So let's start by talking about a problem most of us are kind of sitting with right now, even if we haven't really named it directly. You're creating content, you're running paid campaigns, you're posting consistently on social. And generally we're seeing the returns getting harder and harder to justify. Click through rates are down, cost per click is up in some sectors, dramatically so. And then there's the issue that's been quietly reshaping search marketing for the last couple of years. AI overviews in Google. So users ask a question, Google answers it right there on the page and your carefully optimized article never actually gets the clip. And the traffic that was flowing through to our websites is increasingly not even arriving. And this isn't going to be a temporary blip. It's a real structural shift in how we're consuming information online and it's really compressing the return on investment most established tactics in digital marketing playbook are really giving us. So what's been the reaction to this? Well, we could keep bidding higher in paid search and hope the economics kind of work out. We can keep chasing organic rankings and accept that a growing proportion of our searches never actually reach our site. Or we can start thinking a bit differently about what digital marketing is actually for. And that's where gamification is not just relevant, but it's maybe strategically important. So the key insight is that gamification is just about making things fun for the sake of it. It's a framework for designing experiences that keep people engaged. They give them a reason to come back and that build a relationship between your brand and your audience that doesn't depend on a paid click or a Google ranking. And maybe we should have been doing this for a long time. So if we're in an Environment where rented attention, because attention we're buying or borrowing from platforms is becoming more expensive, less reliable. Owned engagement is increasingly where the competitive advantage lives. So we could also look at email marketing being connected to this in that we own that email list, we decide what goes into it. We can drive the level of engagement based on our content. And I think gamification of our content lies in this place as well. So let's try and be a bit more precise about what we actually mean in a marketing context, because it can be misunderstood. It doesn't mean that everything needs to be a game, although we will see there is a place that later on. But it means applying the psychological principles that make games compelling to our marketing experiences. So things like progress, mechanics, reward loops, challenge and achievement, social competitions, status recognition, they're all different mechanisms that can make people stay, return and invest emotionally into an experience. And they work because they tap into deep human motivations, the desire to improve, to be recognized, to belong to a group, to complete things. So this is how this kind of maps onto the problems that you just described. Because if users aren't clicking through from search because Google has answered their question, the question becomes what experience can you offer that Google can't? An AI overview can summarize information. It can't provide a personalized challenge, a progress tracker, a quiz that adapts to someone's specific situation, or a community where people share their results. Those kind of experiences live maybe on our platforms and they require a visit. And if they're well designed, they incentivize repeat visits as well. So loyalty programs are probably the most established example of gamification in marketing and they exist precisely because of this kind of logic. But the principle extends beyond points and reward cards. Although I love a loyalty program, if anyone from Bonvoy is listening, I am an absolute Bonvoy fanatic in terms of their loyalty program. And they've got huge levels of gamification. But there's a clear reward. I build my point and I'm basically getting free hotel nights so I can really easily connect my effort to what that outcome is. But it doesn't always have to be like that. So we can apply this to interactive content. So we've got assessments, calculators, quizzes, diagnostic tools. You've got community features, leaderboards, challenges, peer recognition, onboarding flows, email sequences with unlockable content, learning programs with progression structures. You have to do this before you get this. Once you do this, you achieve this. So any touch point where you can introduce some sort of meaningful interaction, progress and reward is a candidate for gamification. Think so. We have a learning platform. We clearly then have certification. If you complete this learning, you get a certification, and that is an accredited certification from ourselves or the Chartered Institute of Marketing. But that's a form of gamification that we're all familiar with on a day by day basis. Now, if we connect this back to our paid media problems because it's directly relevant, your average cost per click is rising. And across a lot of sectors, we're seeing cost per clicks increase year on year as competition goes up, but also because of AI targeted campaigns. And we've mentioned previously that AI targeted campaigns like Performance Max seem to do a lot of retargeting, going after people that have maybe clicked before. So your return on advertising spend is potentially going down and therefore the pressure on conversion rate is going up. You're paying more to get someone to your site, so you need more of them to do something valuable when they arrive. Gamified experiences consistently outperform static pages on engagement metrics, whether that's time on site, pages visited, return visits, or ultimately conversion. So if we can use that paid search traffic or organic traffic, even if we're getting less of it and it's more expensive or harder to get to, a well designed interactive experience that helps maybe a user understand their situation and presents it with a relevant next step that will outperform a brochure page in almost every measurable way. So on social media, organic reach has been declining steadily and paid amplification is becoming the norm, even for content that used to earn free distribution. Gamification potentially offers something valuable, so shareability and participation. So a quiz. People can share their score from a challenge. They can invite colleagues to compete and compare their scores. A poll that sparks a real strong conversation. We see newspapers doing this all the time in the online editions. These kind of formats generate the kind of active engagement that platforms reward with distribution, rather than passive scroll pass that increasingly defines how people experience that branded content. Now the other thing I'd say here is that we've spoken about this previously and we'll speak about it more in some future episodes. But the ability to vibe code to create interactive content using our AI platforms, whether it's ChatGPT, Gemini or anything else, has become massively easier. And actually platforms like Manus allow us to create interactive games that save scores, create leaderboards, it does all the back end for us and so on. And we can do that really easily now. So the barrier to this gamified interactive content has got a lot Lower. There's also a longer term strategic case that's worth making as well. Brands that are going to be the most resilient in the current environment are the ones building their own assets, communities, databases of emails or customers, habitual relationships with their audience. Gamification is one of the most effective tools for building those relationships. When someone earns a badge, completes a challenge, reaches a milestone in your program, or achieves a score they want to improve, they've invested something in and that investment creates a reason to return that doesn't depend on you paying for attention each time. Now this isn't a theoretical kind of future possibility. It's already being done effectively across lots of business to consumer business brands Marketing skills Platforms use progress mechanics to keep learners engaged. So we do this on target. Internet SaaS products use onboarding. Gamifications drive feature adoption showing percentage complete. We saw this on LinkedIn. How much of your profile is complete? Retail brands use challenge mechanics in their apps to sustain purchase behavior. Things like if you spend this much more then get this stuff free. If you spend twice more in the month you become this type of member and get this for free. These kind of techniques are mature, the case studies exist and the tools to implement them are way more accessible than they've ever been because of the ability to vibe. So to bring this together before we move into the conversation that follows, the external environment for digital marketing is more challenging than it was five years ago. The channels that used to deliver reliable cost effective traffic are becoming noisier and more expensive and passive. Content content people to scroll past is losing ground to experiences that actively involve people. We've been speaking about community for a while and that's why why it's the case gamification should be a systematic approach to building these experiences works because it's grounded in how people actually behave, not how we'd like them to behave. And an era where every click is harder to earn. Building experiences worth coming back to is one of the most commercially sound investments a marketing team can make. And actually using some of these vibe coding techniques, we've got the ability to build and to update on an ongoing basis. So we've got these kind of techniques we could use. But what about the actual games side of gamification? Almost a third of the world's population play games of some description, whether that's on a computer, an Xbox or casual gaming on an app on there. I'm going to be joined by Luke from Playspark, a company that specializes in these branded games. And we've Got a Target Internet example that they very kindly created for us. So get over to targetinternet.com podcast or go to Target Internet on LinkedIn and you will see our Sky Stackers game. And you might have played one of these Sky Stacker games before, but go in, play it to your heart's content. Make sure you've logged in to do that so it remembers your score. And we have got a year's free membership of Target Internet up for grabs. If you're an existing member, we'll extend your membership by year for free. And we have got five bundles of Target Internet merchandise for joining in that we will give away as well. So check that out. Target Internet on LinkedIn. So just before we go to the interview, for me, this is a real call to arms. It's much easier to create interactive content. And you've seen a few examples on Target Internet where we've done Persona builders, we've gone through and create user journey map creators. If you haven't, check them out on the Target Internet website. But how could we go beyond that? How could we do something that gamifies and brings you back again and again and provides real value? I think there's so many opportunities in this space at the moment that there's a real first lead advantage as well. So think about how you're going to use Google Gemini or you're going to use ChatGPT or in fact Claude to create some of these things and let us know what you've created and we will share those as well. So targetinternet.com podcast, send us what you built and we will share that. And with that, over to the interview. Am here with Luke, so let's get straight into it. Luke, so what inspired you to start Play Spark and what kind of problem are you trying to solve for brands and marketers?
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B
Yeah, so thanks for having me on, Daniel. We know that 30% of the world's population actually play games. So I saw there was a gap in the market where, you know, you come across ads. These days, people are putting more ad blockers on. I think 67% of the world actually have an ad blocker on their system. So we just started to notice there was a trend where people are blocking ads they're scrolling through. And it was just making it harder for brands not only to acquire new users with advertising, but to actually engage them and retain them with loyalty. So, yeah, so that's what we build PlacePark for. We basically wanted to take what was traditionally a passive advertising ecosystem and turn it into an interactive one. So instead of being a passive viewer of an experience or an ad, we're actually taking that and making you interact with that brand.
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A
So do you think that's the main reason that brands are kind of shifting from those traditional ad experiences to more interactive experiences then, and the kind of playable ads and mini games and things?
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B
Yeah, so a lot of people talk about, you know, attention being the new currency, which is, which is quite true. So if you look at a traditional ad, it might take your attention for one or two seconds, but when you talk about an interactive game, like we're seeing average play times up to three or four minutes with games, so you extrapolate that out to capturing someone's attention and being actively involved in your brand. It's quite powerful.
- [13:37]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's particularly interesting. One of the things we've been talking about in the podcast a lot recently is this no click environment. So the idea that you're searching in Google but you're not clicking now, because the AI overview, you're going to social media, you're engaging with content maybe, but you're still not clicking. So that brand exposure and brand interaction obviously becomes. Comes really important. I mean, what kind of results are you seeing from brands in terms of engagement or conversions or I mean, even maybe return on investment? How do you kind of look at that?
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B
Yeah, so it's really interesting. The great thing about games is because they're just, you know, they work as an advertising channel or an engagement channel. They can be used across any brand and any industry. So we've seen the likes of retailers across, you know, quick service restaurants all the way through to fmcg food and beverage brands use either. We'd split it into two parts, so you can either use MI games to brand it for loyalty. So in that instance, we did a campaign with an alcohol retailer called Thirsty Camel down here in Australia. And what they did is they ran a game which was branded and themed to Australian Rules football and they gated that. So it was part of their loyalty system. So when you logged into your loyalty account, you actually created an account for you in the game and then you went and flicked a footy. It was a 3D type game. You flicked a footy at Cairns, which had their supplier brands as the Cairns. And we had really good results with them. So their goal for that was to engage their loyalty members outside a transaction. So they're all about, okay, people spend with us, but how do we actually engage them in between transaction? So out of that they had 10% of their loyalty members played the game, they had over 40,000 gameplays and they had an average of five to six minutes per session and they had up to sort of 10 to 15 plays per user. So it was pretty crazy in how they did that. But the big one for them was it wasn't just the engagement, it was the conversion to sale. You know, when we talk about ad units for games, the great thing about them is you can use them for acquisition, you can use them for data capture, but it's actually a full funnel channel where you can funnel them all the way through to sale. So they had 12% of people that played the game, won a reward within the game based on achievement, and then they went in and spent money and redeemed that in store. So from an engagement and a business objective perspective, it was a really good outcome for them. And that's where we see a lot of brands at the moment using games, is in loyalty. We've had a few come into the space to try and use it as an acquisition campaign too, as meta ads and that type of thing.
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A
So they're really interested in. Because you're talking about real world incentives here then. And we were speaking just before we connect stuff about prizes and those kind of things. Is that normally a kind of key part of this or does it work without that as well?
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B
Yeah, so we've done activations without prizes and with prizes there is quite a big difference when you have a prize as opposed to a non prize activation. So you're talking, you know, with a prize it's probably 10 to 15 times more engagement in terms of converting to watch or play then it's a similar metric to actually go through that whole cycle and finish that game. So prices are quite important. So we like to think of games as like a supercharged promotion. Yeah. So it is important.
- [16:53]
A
I think it's fascinating because we, you know, we were a B2B organization and actually we found that with our merchandise. So we have these mugs and we did these kind of limited edition mugs of different, you know, different designs for each one and they're massive mugs and actually people were super keen on them and it became a real thing. Like we'd go and we'd have our sessions live and people would be sitting there drinking for the mugs and oh, you've got that one, I've got this one. It actually can work even in those kind of circumstances as well. So what's the kind of future of this view at the moment? I mean, obviously you built play Spark, how do you see this kind of evolving over time?
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B
So there's two things we're sort of moving into. So a lot of us, our work has been in mini games for loyalty and that's still scaling out. But the other thing we're noticing that's working for brands is what's called playable ads. So these are 10 to 15 second versions of games which you use as an ad in either meta or you know, know Google display network, or they're predominantly used in mobile gaming. So if you ever played a game like Candy Crush, you might be shown a short playable out of a brand. The great thing about those is that you have to play that game and you're immersed in that brand. You can't turn away because you're part of that experience. So there's playable ads and then there's also personalization. So what we're starting to see is that with loyalty programs that embed our games in, we can, the way that our system works is it, it works on parameters so you can change all the elements of the game. But what we're looking to do is if we've got a data set of a group of users in a loyalty program and one user goes in to play a game, if we've got certain data sets of that user, we can dynamically change that game to show that user what they're interested in. So let's say it's a retailer game, they like Nike shoes. We can actually change the assets of the game to show those products within the game dynamically. And we can also change the reward system to dynamically show those awards to that user. So that's where we see it heading at the moment is heavy on personalization.
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A
Okay, so let's get into the practicalities for our kind of audience. So what are some practical ways that they can add interactive to their campaigns without actually necessarily building a full game?
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B
Yeah, so it's funny. So with a lot of brands, gaming and mini games is quite new. So it's hard to wrap their heads around it. Yeah, that's the most simplest thing to get started with is understanding what are you trying to achieve and then map that game to that business objective. But usually it's something as simple as a trivia game or a spin to win game which you can go in and brand and whip up pretty quickly. So with Play Spark, essentially it's like Canva, you can go and create your own game, change the elements and you can essentially get your game within 10 minutes. So for brands going into this space, it's just about, okay, what are my objectives? Is it user acquisition? Is it, you know, who's my user base as well? Who's gonna play this type of game? Cause there's different genres of games which will target different age demographics and groups. So if you're targeting 60 to 80 year olds, they're more into puzzle games, strategy, that type of thing. But if you're targeting 15 or 30 year olds, they're more about arcade and social and those types of things. So I was thinking about those types of things, but I think to get started it's just keeping it simple and making it simple for the user and what their experience is.
- [20:06]
A
All right, so if we're running ad campaigns of interactive elements, what are the metrics we should be measuring? How are we going to look at this from a kind of success point of view? Because I know it's not going to purely be about the impressions or the clicks.
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B
Yeah, exactly. Right. So when we work with brands, we like to split it into two categories. So it's about what are game metrics and what are the business objectives and what are the metrics to measure them. Common metrics you would want to look at with a mini game, let's say it's for loyalty you want to look at. Okay, if I'm sending an email out to my database, what is that conversion rate, someone to click to open that game. Then from there we're looking at game metrics. So looking at play rate, how many people that open that game are actually going and playing that game. Then completion rate, we're looking at how many completed that, we're looking at how interactive and how engaging is this game. And then dwell time takes into that as well. How long do they spend playing? Do they come back and play? So they're sort of the game metrics that you want to look at. And then when you look at business objectives, it's all about, okay, well if I'm using this game to try and acquire leads, let's say data caption, you've got an email capture form at the end of the game, you're looking at, okay, how, what percentage of the users that played actually went and you know, filled in that form and got that email. Or alternatively it might be I want to drive E Comm sales, how many people actually went, played the game, went to my ecom store and redeemed the coupon that they won in the game. So yeah, we always talk about split it into business objectives and game objectives and then you can just track that full funnel all the way through.
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A
So I'm quite interested because I love you described it as like a canvas that you can go and design your own kind of approach to things and you've got that kind of speed to testing this out. So what about if someone's got an existing campaign and wants to add some sort of activation to it, what would you be approach to that?
- [21:52]
B
I think the thing with games is you can either add it as a complement to your existing campaign or you can change the creative. So let's just say you've got an ad on Facebook or meta and you want to drive traffic to your website. You can essentially go in, create, duplicate the same campaign and instead of the image or video as the creative, you take a URL of one of our games or another company that you might use and you essentially add that as the creative. And then what you're trying to do is you're changing the ad copy to be about clay to win rather than, you know, go to our store or visit our site. So it's pretty simple, you just change into creative and slightly changing the ad copy, but the power in what it does for your metrics is quite large. So we've recently done a campaign with a quick service restaurant down here who sell pretzels and they had a 10 times increase in the impressions in their meta ads going from one same one promotion and just simply changing it to a game instead of a simple image. And that had enormous impacts on how much conversions they had to install sales. So there's different ways you can go about it, but there are a couple of examples of how people can go about it.
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A
Well, let's talk about that a bit more then, because what are the key creative principles then? Like a mini game or an interactive actually makes it memorable. What's going to make it work? From a creative perspective, the best way
- [23:17]
B
to approach games is to make them simple to understand, simple to play. So when someone first interacts with a game, you want them to understand what to do. So within two seconds they can play and they want to, you want to make it easy for them, but if you want them to play longer, you eventually want to make that game harder to master. The longer that they play, it does come down to what your objective is. So if your objective is trying to get them to visit a website or get their email, you want to make that interaction as fun and as quick as possible. But if you're using it for loyalty, it's all about, okay, I want to make this creative last a little bit longer. So I'M going to make that game a little bit more interactive, a little bit harder and keep people engaged a
- [24:02]
A
longer term, I should say to people as well. If you want to see some examples of this. And we've actually built out a kind of target Internet one as well. If you go to target.com podcast, you'll see a load of examples there in the show notes. Obviously we've linked through to the website there, so you can play around with this as well. But what about brand story? Because a lot of if this is going to be about brand reinforcements, you've got the kind of direct conversion. But what about trying to tell a brand story entirely that kind of into that quite short game experience? How'd you go about doing that?
- [24:29]
B
I think the low hanging fruit there is simply just changing the game to fit the assets that you're trying to achieve. So say you've got a flappy bird type game, which is one of our templates. You go in and let's say you're a coffee brand. You might create a coffee bean with wings type animation, going through rings and flying and collecting coffee cups, that type of thing. Then you can start to build your logos and your branding into the back of the background so you can start to theme it and brand it. So people start to feel like it's a coffee based game. So that's probably number one. The other things we do with our games is we sort of interlink and embed marketing into the game. So we have things like if you reach level one, you'll have a level one pop up saying well done. You could plug your brand story into that so you can have a pop up and say well done. You know, did you know? You know X coffee brand was 40 years old. That type of thing starts to brand your story. The other cool thing we do is in gaming there's this thing called rewarded interactions. So you might play a game, lose a life, you want to get your score back and keep going. You can actually interact with these rewarded marketing pieces. So with Play Spark you can plug in rewarded video or surveys or those types of things. You might want to go back. With my old score I can watch a quick 30, 15 second video, get my reward and go back. So with those videos you can start to embed those key story messages about your brand, which was pretty cool. And people immersed in those rewarded activities because they know there's a reward on the end of it to get back into that game. So it's pretty good loop of how to keep people engaged.
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A
And then once you built something like this, can you use it beyond a single campaign? What's the kind of life cycle of this?
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B
Let's say you want to create one game, you can use that game in multiple parts of your business. So depending on what type of business you have, depends on where you can distribute it. So for instance, we've got one client that created one game. They used it as a playable ad to drive people to their website. They had the same game on the counter of their in store venue to scan and play, and it had a slight different reward attached to it. But then they also had in some of their venues a kiosk. So some venues might have a kiosk where you can touch screen and order your food. They had the game on the actual kiosk. So you could play the game on the kiosk and off you go. That, that's an example of just using one game in different situations. Or you could take one game, duplicate it in our system, slightly rebrand it, change awards slightly, you know, touch it up a little bit. So you might create the same game across summer and have a summer type theme. Let's say Easter rolls around, you might create the same game with an Easter feel. So you could repurpose it and use it the same objective or different objectives.
- [27:10]
A
Okay, so we've kind of got the theory. If marketers now want to go off and experiment with this and they want to try and look at gamified content, you know, in the next month, what the steps are going to take, how they're going to get into it.
- [27:19]
B
So there's some easy ways and some hard ways. So traditionally what a brand might do is go to an agency and say, hey, can you build me again? You might be flipped a bill of 40 or $50,000 to do that.
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A
Right.
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B
It might take you four or five months for them to build it out for you. And that's one of the reasons we built Play Spark is it's just, it's often too expensive and lengthy to do that. Especially it's an experimental advertising channel for most. So you could go into someone like Playspark or there are other companies that do things similar to us with Placebo, you can go in, create an account for free, you can get a template of a game and then you can go and create that, brand it and add your marketing rewards in and essentially you can spit that out within 30 minutes and start sharing it. So the way that these are shared normally is as a URL. So you could send it as an email campaign with a URL People click and play, or you can embed it in your website or your app. So there's various ways you can do it, but generally the no code game creation way is starting to take off. So especially for brands who are cost conscious and want to just test it out.
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A
Well, let's talk about Playspot specifically from a kind of cost point of view. So how do you charge? Is it based on the game you create? Is it based on usage? What's the approach?
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B
Yeah, so we're quite flexible with our pricing and if you go to our website, you'll see it's pretty transparent. So there's two options. So if you want to dip your toe in the water and then have a go, you can go in and create a game from scratch, you can test it out, you can do that all that free. And then when you want to launch it and you want to share that, you essentially just pay a single fixed fee for 30 days and off you go. So you could do that for as little as $199 for that 30 days. Then if you find it works for your business and you're like, okay, well I want to roll this game out across, you know, my ads and my in store and E commerce and in my app, then you can go to subscription and you can start to pay for as we do it for as little as 150amonth. You can have as many campaigns per month as you want. So, yeah, it's pretty simple to go and do these days, especially with how we've run it.
- [29:21]
A
Yeah, no, I love it because I think always the barrier, it is experimental for people. They're not sure if this is going to work. They're not sure what this is going to kind of feel like for their customers. And actually this ability to go and just try it out, get something out. Their launch up at, you know, a pretty, pretty low cost is phenomenal as well. Right. So how can people get in contact, tell us about best ways to reach out, kind of engage.
- [29:39]
B
Yeah. So the two easiest ways are LinkedIn. If you look at myself, Luke Santa Maria, I'm pretty active there on my email is Luke co Perfect.
- [29:48]
A
We'll put it all in the show notes targetinternet.com podcast. We'll put a link through to that example game and we'll get linked through to all Luke's details as well. So, Luke, thank you so much for joining us and kind of introducing us this gamification approach and we'll be very interested to hear how the listeners get on with it.
- [30:01]
B
Thanks Daniel. Appreciate it.
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A
For more episodes resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com forward/podcast.