The sacrificial road to mobile gaming...

So I got back from a new media conference in London last week. Manal Khater, the superior planner in the agency, always asks when new media stop being new…

Anyhow, going to have the next couple of posts as refreshers of the conference sessions…here is the firt accompanied with my thoughts

Ad Funded Mobile Entertainment

So the mobile phone’s importance has gone up a couple of notches in a marketers priority gauge to say the least…It now just falls short of 1'keeping their jobs' and 2'making consumers miserable.'

The reason obviously being, the phone is ubiquitous thus should their annoying ads and offcourse this benevolant cause lends itself quite nicely to priotity 2...

So up until today when discussing mobile gaming, there usually tends to be 3 stakeholders…


1The content providers…the guys who make the games and sell them to the…
2 telco operators…the guys who buy the games then sell em to…
3 The consumer…the guys who pay to play the game
…
But now there is the introduction of a 4th stakeholder, the ubiquitous marketer who wants to advertise, on, inm through and possibly around the game…

This is where it gets a little complicated…

So now the dynamics with the 4 stakeholder has changed a little…

The content providers make the game…
They sell it to the telco operators…
which then gets bought by the marketers who then pass it on to
the consumer who get to play the game for free so long as they watch the ad preceding the free game they just downloaded…
Offcourse, the hope being that the last standing screen between you and your free game that says (more info?) will divert your decision and make you want to find out more about a biscuit instead of playing Desert Rally 4.


If you have read up this far, thank you for baring with me, I have no hypothesis at this point…Other than…someone, who goes through trouble of logging on to the telco portal, or web to download a game is most likely not going to have any further interaction with the ad they are forced to see with the exception of stimulated annoyance, which would most likely (looking for the antonym of halo) have a horn effect? I.e piss em off.


On your way to the park, some guy who steps in your way and kicks off on a sales pitch is not going to engage anyone...

It’s not a difficult equation, brands should provide entertainment, not obstruct it (even if they are bringing it to you for free)…and this my friends, is the eternal dichotomy seperating good brands and bad brands…

Good brands entertain bad brands obstruct...