Advergame as an event promotion method

Have you ever played a game called ‘Travel Frenzy’?

Do you know about the concept called ‘advergame’?

Have you thought advergames can be used as a promotion method for your event?

Advergame, a portmanteau of ‘advertising’ and ‘game’, means an advertising method which uses video games. With the growth of Internet, advergames have proliferated, often becoming the most visited aspect of brand websites, then promoting repeated traffic to websites and reinforcing brand recognition. Also advergames would be a good way of word of mouth or viral marketing encouraging gamers to invite their friends to participate (2011, Wikipedia)

‘Travel Frenzy’ was created by viral advergame specialists Koko Digital and launched on 10^th January, 2011 to promote an exhibition. Koko Digital joined a team with Travel Technology Europe exhibition which is one of the UK’s biggest travel exhibitions. Chris Steele, Director of Koko Digital, said: “We were chosen as viral partners for the TTE exhibition because of our success promoting other events over the past few years.” As he said, the company has worked for several events such as E-Commerce Expo North and South 2010, and Technology for Marketing and Advertising events from 2008 to 2010.

If you are interested to experience Travel Frenzy, visit http://travelfrenzy.kokogames.com. During the game, you are in charge of booking travel as your clients want aiming to book as many as possible in the time given. Before and after the game, the logo of TTE exhibition is shown on the screen, and gamers can follow the link and visit the website of the event.

TTE exhibition and Koko Digital are hoping that this game will bring successful promotion result. The most remarkable feature of advergame would be ‘interactive’ aspect. People enter into an interactive relation with a brand through advergame and the brand awareness is hard to be forgotten. According to a study (2011, Wise et al.), not all entertaining will be equally effective in achieving its goal. They say that the game should be product-relevant and that the ad attitude should affect to brand attitude.

Advergame would be a revolutionary advertising channel, only when it is applied in a right way. However the effectiveness and efficiency of this kind of promoting way is not well proven yet in events industry. Now, the next step is to use advergame smartly in Event industry.

Source: http://www.traveldailynews.com/pages/show_page/41059-Viral-game-to-bring-visitors-to-travel-industry-event

http://jiad.org/article107

Image Retrieved from: http://travelfrenzy.kokogames.com