Gardenburger, independent though publicly held, is in a pitched competitive battle for the vegetarian-dieting crowd with two deep-pocketed giants: Morningstar Farms Inc., which recently was acquired by Kellogg Company, and Boca Burger, which was picked up by Kraft Foods. "We have to try to squeeze that extra nickel out of every quarter of marketing spending," Preiser explains, "and web-based options are a good, cost-efficient way for us to get the word out."

Advergaming is also a great opportunity for integrated marketing efforts. A recent sweepstakes for Hanes, for example, promoted the apparel company's new "tagless" t-shirt by using a tag as the virtual game piece: "Lifting" it with the mouse revealed the visitor's prize.

New synergies are being created daily as interactive-relationship marketing helps drive consumers beyond the Internet. For example, Healthy Choice has used its online games to drive people to supermarkets to actually buy its products, by offering the chance for customers to print "mystery coupons" off the Internet, which can be redeemed in-store for prizes ranging from 50 cents off to a US$ 1 million jackpot.

EPrize's key is the institutional memory it has built through the creation of more than 500 online games and other promotions. It can basically take a modular approach to putting together new promotions, reusing lines and blocks of operating code that it previously has perfected and combining and customizing its electronic capabilities into packages suited for each client. Similarly, EPrize has put together a comprehensive understanding of the US's state-by-state laws concerning sweepstakes and of the tight electronic security that clients demand for all of the information that is generated in a campaign, from customer data to the encryption that ensures cheats don't win the contest.

"It's like the way a legal document is written," Linkner explains. "It usually includes a bunch of different paragraphs that are precise and powerful but that are boilerplate, and don't change from application to application. That's how our code is: We keep reusing it, and so we don't have to draft it anew each time. It's sort of like using a wizard template when you're on a Microsoft program."

But while it may cost a brand marketer only a few thousand dollars to develop, launch and execute a simple online sweepstakes, more companies are anteing up to invest the six-figure sums that are required to field a full-blown, highly branded video game online. Such games weren't even a possibility until the very recent advance of Internet-transmission technology, to the point where even a dial-up modem can carry enough digital robustness to accommodate a rich gaming environment.

"And when you're allowing someone to play, for free, a game that they would expect to pay for, you'll find that they're very responsive to providing you email addresses and other registration information," says Leviathan's Ridgway. Not only that, but the several minutes of involvement by a consumer with a branded video game yields a much stronger interaction with the brand than, say, a 30-second TV ad, he says.

Leviathan's game for Fox Sports in 2001 used telemetry data transmitted by radio waves from actual pitches in the Series and allowed visitors to try to connect with virtual versions of the same balls. For Korean carmaker Hyundai, Leviathan created a road-rally game online to promote its new Tiberion model. Visitors can play only part of the game before they're asked to register so they can finish the rally. "It's a great way to hook the user," he says, "because they see what they're getting before you ask them to provide any information."

The Chrysler Group has become a big believer in the value of online games as promotional devices, fielding a variety of what Jeep division vice president Jeff Bell calls "thin" games and "fat" games. The "thin" games have included Get Up & Go, which appears on Chrysler's website asking 21 probing questions about road-trip behavior and then presenting a profile of the visitor's approach to car traveling. In just the first month, Get Up & Go nabbed 40,000 registrants, 17,000 of whom asked for additional product information. Another thin game being piloted by Jeep includes Disc Dogger, which lets a player "throw" a Frisbee so that a terrier can jump up and catch it in his jaws – against a landscape heavily populated with Jeep vehicles.

The "fat" motion-oriented video games include a trail-blazing contest that helped launch the new Jeep Rubicon SUV and a Dodge-branded game in which the player "drives" a Zamboni ice-making machine on a hockey rink. Of the first 550 Rubicons sold, for which customers shelled out payment even before the vehicles were produced, a remarkable 85 matched up as individuals who had played the online game. "All of our games so far have been like this," Bell says. "They've all met or exceeded expectations."

Although online advertising has taken some hits in the past as being annoying and ineffective, it looks as though advergaming may be just what marketers were looking for.    

[24-Feb-2003]