How to win at the new game of marketing: now and in the future
By John Gower. Top image: Adobe stock
A new wave of gaming technology brings a new set of marketing challenges and opportunities. Dialect CEO John Gower explains how to power up your brand and without the buzzword bullshit.
The pandemic isn’t over, but the impact on marketing is. And the demand for better quality customer experiences, amplified by the restrictions of recent years, is set to rise exponentially with the crystallization of the metaverse in the mainstream, future XR (Extended Reality), and the revolution of digital ownership.
Every type of brand you can think of, Balenciaga, McLaren, Nike and new Web3 companies are aiming to reach the brands and the consumer market. At Dialect, because of our decade of gaming specialty, we have become a broker in this new world, connecting brands with gamers, gaming words to brands and Web3 companies to consumers.
There’s an ecosystem and language that needs orchestrating and connecting in a way that makes sense for the gamer. Don’t be fooled by the word “gamer”, it means so much more in this new world.
Gaming has always led the way for new technologies and experiences. It is the canary in the coal mine - the litmus test of where the market is going. Almost half of the world’s population game right now, and every type of person is a gamer. For a brand to ignore this avid community would be perilous.
It is a creative community that pushes new boundaries, the first to experiment with new platforms in order to drive new narratives. And it is the most vocal community on the internet. This combination of creativity, technology and cultural relevance makes gaming and gamers uniquely placed to define the future marketing landscape.
Leading game publishers have been playing this game already, exploring new frontiers, and the consumer industry is scrambling to keep pace. The next question is how to figure out the potential scale of partnerships, how to manage explosive growth and the feasibility of implementing interoperability.
The future is here, it’s now and it’s a different model
The rise of cloud-based gaming and XR/MR (Mixed Reality) have provided a taste of what’s to come, with the surge of interest in Web3, the metaverse and NFTs driving a new creative and business model.
It’s fair to say that NFTs are a divisive topic for gamers, but ironically they’ve been buying NFTs in some form or other for many years. The difference is they never actually owned them – and ownership is going to be a critical aspect going forwards.
Brands will need to be inclusive – and this will lead to a model where fans can be owners and not renters of brands and experiences that they love; to truly feel that they are *part* of something, and not just being *sold* something.
This is why the rise of the creator economy is such an exciting aspect of gaming. It’s the start of brands really pushing control and allowing audiences to truly participate. Not just in the creativity and where the stories and games are going, but also in sharing in revenues and truly having partnerships. It opens the doors for massive growth and massive brand loyalty from audiences.
Knowing where to begin is challenging. Read on.
Strong positioning survives the new rules of engagement
So how can brands in and outside of gaming position themselves to have a chance of engaging in this space?
Faced with finite budgets in uncertain times with mounting macroeconomic pressures, why should brands even be considering investing in an unwritten future, and far-off concepts such as the embodied internet?
Well, if the digital transformation taught us one thing, it’s to not wait until it’s too late. Many companies were too slow to truly transform digitally, bogged down in vanity projects and a legacy siloed approach to customer experience, engagement and performance – a flaw that was magnified by the shift to life in lockdown.
Change is going to happen with or without you, so be brave and don’t be left behind. That’s not to say you have to have a fully baked NFT/Web3/metaverse strategy right now. But you should be present in one form or another, testing and iterating. Learn from the early adopters of the digital transformation, and allocate 5% of your marketing budget to exploring your brand in this new space.
We encourage clients to move way beyond the short term gains and plan for the future. Not planning *how* you’re going to execute, but rather how your audiences and customers will be part of the brand transformation and the future of the brand.
As long as you know who you are and what you stand for, and you’re authentic in that communication, then those pillars will stand you in good stead for the future.
Brands in the metaverse
So where do you start when you want to define your position in this space? Where do you want to play?
The metaverse is as good a place as any. Or rather, the metaverses, since there are multiple versions and none of them are interconnected. The detail of how you have a shared experience across these different metaverses and how you transfer assets between them is still to be defined.
The concept of shared alternative realities is not a new one, of course. The 20-year-old Second Life is one of the pioneers in this space, although its approach is much more circumscribed than today’s vision of the metaverse, with its ambition to deliver experiences that span the real and virtual worlds.
Roblox is arguably the highest profile of all the runners in the metaverse game. Indeed, the company sees itself as the ‘shepherds of the metaverse’. While Roblox doesn’t consider itself to be a gaming platform, play is an intrinsic part of the experience. There are all sorts of immersive games and interactions, with a wonderful, vibrant community that you can be part of. It’s social, it’s a place of belonging, it’s competitive – and with an average of 52.2 million daily active users in Q2 2022, it’s a big player.
Major brands such as Spotify, Gucci, and McLaren Racing have been experimenting with the gamification and interactive experiences delivered by the platform, and Roblox will be testing its new immersive advertising system with Gucci and Tommy Hilfiger later this year.
More and more brands and franchises have woken up to the potential of marketing in the metaverse and reaching their audience through the gamer lens and community. Worth a reported $38.85 billion in 2021, the market is forecast to swell to $678.8 billion by 2030, underlying the importance of why it’s so important to embrace change now.
We’re probably a decade out from some of the truly transcendental experiences, but brands need to be positioning themselves today in order to be ready for that moment.
You need a “3D” strategy that lasts long term, which a blog post won’t cover and we have a downloadable guide for that you should definitely read, and we encourage at the very least to try out an idea to get a flavor of the gaming world, and how to engage the audiences who are most certainly your target, only they are in a gaming mindset.
(Art: MO EID)
How will your brand show up? Don’t forget the connections that matter.
One thing we explore with clients is not to what the metaverse or embodied internet is or what it might be, but how the brand shows up. So, how it tells its stories, what it does do and what it doesn’t do.
Even though a brand might stand for a clear set of values, inclusivity is critical. In the past, gaming has been too exclusive, too ‘Bro Code’. I think for us, as an agency, and also for the more advanced gaming companies and publishers and developers, we understand that that’s a world we need to leave behind. Gaming is not just powerful PC gaming, it’s also people who play bingo on their phones. It’s a vast, diverse audience, and we need to respect that fact.
It’s very hard for an agency which doesn’t come from this space to try to talk to these audiences. That’s why a specialist integrated agency such as Dialect is best placed to get the message across in a credible way. Gamers can smell bullshit pretty quickly and they’re very vocal about it. It’s vital to not be reactive and frustrate them, but be purposeful and integrate well.
““We understand these audiences because we are these audiences. Dialect was founded a decade ago by people who built and launched gaming magazines and websites. We’ve been working in the space for such a long time that we understand it intimately.””
It’s not just the specialism advantage, but the level of integration too, especially to preserve and grow your brand. In a world where there are multiple agencies out there working on the same account doing multiple disciplines, your data and your understanding and your insights are going to get lost.
There are significant challenges to understanding the data flow with the cookieless future that we’re all facing imminently, and all sorts of data points and insights need to be added across the myriad of experiences and places that we work.
Everything from social and media buying to research projects and the creative we produce – every stage of the journey needs to be tracked and analyzed by humans. Only then will we have an understanding of what to double down on and what to exclude.
Finally, in a world that’s changing fast, where Web3 technology is altering the relationship between brands and consumers, and the way we think about online identity, it is our collective responsibility to not forget that we are marketing to human beings.
The best marketing moves masses of people to take some form of action, and you can do it with a big media budget or you can do it through beliefs and culture, moving people by connecting to shared beliefs and influencing movement without the media dollar behind it. When you do both, that’s integrated marketing without sacrifice.
Change is coming, but while the promise of integration continues to be a struggle, the path ahead doesn’t need to be complex, confusing or siloed. Get in touch with us to master your gaming and gamer strategy now – and in the future.
If you would like to discover more about our integrated approach and work together on a project, get in touch.
