Bringing Advertising To Social Gaming

In the late 1800's, Jules Verne was approached by shipping operators to include references of their companies in his 1874 classic Around the World In Eighty Days. With these simple requests the age of product placement was born, and is a tool that still permeates our cinema, television, sporting and radio experiences.

136 years later, the new battlefield for brands is in the social media spaces, and no area is more ready to pop than social gaming.

In a report from Nielson analysing online habits of Americans between July 2009 and June 2010, it was shown that social gaming had surpassed personal email as the second most popular activity on the web (over 56 million Americans play online social games).

This (no doubt) will come as a shock to a lot of brands and businesses that still think the world of gaming is restricted to a youth/teen market. The ubiquitous assimilation of smartphones and social networking has presented society with a way to connect beyond the realm of status updates and political-career-ending party photos.

Our leisure time is now under assault from advertisers keen to find new markets and engage consumers in unique and interesting ways.

I think it's important to note here that brands must be willing to bend their brand image to suit the narrative of the social games they seek to interact with. Much like putting a video on YouTube and expecting it to go "viral" is a fallacy, expecting to stick your brand name in any social game will also miss the mark. Being creative in integration is just as important as being integrated when it comes to social gaming.

Personal case study: I always remember playing GoldenEye 64 in the late 1990's, and one of the tasks for me (AKA James Bond) was to recover a top secret video recording from a Russian bunker. When I discovered that recording was actually a VHS of the GoldenEye movie (complete with cover art) I literally got a little excited. I can only thank the lord in-app purchasing wasn't available in those days or I would have spent a lot of money.

So how can we integrate? How can brands get on board this social gaming wagon?

Currently the social gaming experience is dominated by brands and businesses offering retail goods, subscription services, surveys and branded videos. Engaging with these businesses online usually results in some form of virtual credit or currency.

Personally I like the idea of branded goods within the game as an easy first-step for brands. I find it has wider scope for creativity than the Hit Wall and less costly than building your own branded game. Have a look around the online space at some of the more popular games out there, and think about what virtual rewards or goods you might be able to offer players (read: "your consumers").

As always, think outside the box and keep it creative/radical. We play games to escape reality, so don't try and drag what you do in other media campaigns back through the digital door unchanged and expect results.

Photography From Radical Love's Anthony MacFarlane

I thought the social media world should be aware that the talents of Anthony MacFarlane are not limited to his handsome good looks nor his boyish charm.

It turns out the man takes a mean still image to compliment his broad talents in the realm of motion pictures.

For those that don't subscribe to his weekly blog updates over at rival blog community web.me.com I'm going to try and convince the man that art has a place in this space, and get him to post some of his finest here.

To start things moving I've chosen one of my favourites above, entitled "Madonna". This is possibly because of the very American legs on display, or possibly it was the soundtrack to the photoshoot...

Or maybe there's a religious element to all this I'm missing.

Either way, Macca himself says:

This is a composition of sea water taken at Bronte pool and a rough sandstone wall in the back of Waverley. The angles of the legs were to replicate the lines in the stonework.

Just awesome.

Virgin Blue Social Media Content

Big thanks to all the good eggs at Virgin Blue (especially Sir Richard Branson and John Borghetti) for letting us run a-muck in Melbourne during your 10th Birthday Celebration.

It was "unique" to spend four consecutive days within 50m of an airport, and unless we have our own volcanic action in the coming years, an event unlikely to be repeated in the history of my life.

Great people. Great times. Thanks!

Politics & Social Media? Boring? Wait For 2030!

And so finally today Australia has a government (according to my Twitter feed anyways)! After a long election campaign that bored half the nation to sleep, followed by secret talks that scraped in on the lowest rung of news-worthiness, we can now get on with tweeting and posting disgruntled comments about our newly-appointed representatives.

Looking back over the 2010 election there seemed to be a dissatisfied taste in a lot of people's (read: "nerd's") mouths about the limited application of social media in this campaign. The Gillard/Abbott camps seemed to apply social media as an afterthought, without any real sense of influence or excitement about the medium.

It seems politicians are yet to wake up to the digital tools they have at their disposal...

But that's about to change.

Last month when I was speaking in Melbourne at XMediaLab we began discussing convergence in social media, and what the landscape might look like in 2030. Wonderful technologies like facial recognition, predictive search, video tagging and geo-location tracking were all bandied about in a beautiful dream-like conversation. The future seemed so exciting and transparent with all forms of history on a global and hyper-local level at our fingertips.

But transparency and history are the enemy of politicians, who week after week are forced to resign as uncovered truths from the past or present are splashed across ever-widening social networks at ever increasing speeds.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt even came out last month and said:

"perhaps people should change their names upon reaching adulthood to eradicate the potentially reputation-damaging search records Google keeps"

Interesting tactic, but I think it is a realistic vision of the future.

In the election race of 2030, all the teenagers and twenty-somethings blindly posting and passing on their personal history will be around 40-50 years old - prime politician age! And oh how that will come back to haunt them. Any photo you're in (from any point in history) will be automatically tagged by powerful facial recognition software. Even if your face is in a mask, in the shadows, side-on, you're not safe from the computing power of 2030 (which will be on average 64 times faster than 2010). It will analyse a database of locations that match the interior of the room and give the image or video a location. We can then search the corners of the web for blogs, posts, comments or any byte of information that connects to that time and place, and suddenly the world can be pieced together through the countless insignificant comments of a generation.

Essentially the vast pile of decades of tagged social media will provide the public with the drama it has sought in its election campaigns. A Stephanie Rice-esque tweet that may have gone unnoticed in 2010 will be there for all to see and judge when it's scooped up by smarter, more accurate search engines of the future.

The internet never forgets, and the hazy parts of its memory will only be focused and clarified as time and technology march on. This is certain to revolutionise our expectations of political figures, as well as provide some much-needed scandal and drama for the voting public in the years ahead.

Nano App Store?

With the release of the new touchscreen iPod Nano last week, it got me thinking if Apple has its sights on another app store (to compliment the iPad/iPhone stores) with Nano-specific apps?

It would make sense, given that the screen and shape are specific to the Nano, and the sort of apps would probably be more fitness-orientated than the bigger Apple products.

Apple has it in their interests to expand the reach of the app store as far as possible to capture more developer interests and to ensure no corner of the music market isn't left open to penetration by small companies.

I was interested to read the Nano doesn't run iOS, preferring a lighter, more simplified version of the multi-touch software specific for the device. I'll be interested to see how developers respond to this.

It's an interesting time for Apple as the competition begins to catch up on some of their flagship products. The need for innovation has never been greater, but I think this is a smart move by the company to expand their market for touch products, potentially opening up a new market for Nano-specific apps and solidifying their dominance in the music player market.