Virtual worlds: Ways of in-game advertising.

The video game industry is a multi-billion dollar business. No other sector has experienced the same explosive growth, one can not overestimate the enormous amount of money which is put in and made from that particular industry. More than half of all Americans (58%) play video games, the average US household owns at least one gaming device (PC, console, smartphone). Gaming is not just for guys anymore: 45% of all video gamers are female (Entertainment Software Association, 2013). With a total spending of 20.77 billion (!!!) dollars in 2012 this market has to be carefully taken care of.

From my experience there are three ways a company (or organization) can use video games to present advertising to audiences. The target audience of certain games are very specific in their interests (psychographics more than demographics): football simulations are played by a different audience than first person shooters or role-playing simulations.

#1: Use brands, their models and aura
The easiest and most subtile way of in-game advertising is branding. The use of Adidas-sportswear in Fifa13, suprisingly accurate (yet not branded) car-models in GTA 4 and very convincing and real-looking rifles in Battlefield 4 are very good examples for the power of brands in the developing process. Mostly developers ask brands for permission to use their models because they want their games to be more realistic.

Adidas in Fifa13

The "UBERMACHT"-SentinelXS in GTA 4

BMW M3 (real life)

Sometimes, video game developers want to profit from real-life brands without having the permission to use them. What they do is creating a similar brand because they don't want to to loose the effect of real brands.

Nuka-Cola vending machine in Fallout 3

#2: Direct advertising
Subliminal perception is the next big thing. And so is direct in-game advertising. You may not notice it consciously but it effects your behaviour more than you think.

#3: Games that train for the job
The public may not be aware of this yet, but computer games are predicting our skills in future jobs, at least according to the U.S. Army. It is not a secret that the military is looking for new recruits in the gaming world. The skills needed for sterning a drone are quite similar with the skills shown in first person shooters like Battlefield. Therefore the U.S. Army launched a free game called "America's Army" (download it here!) to simulate real-life war to (1) advertise their "cool" job and (2) to spot potential early, even before recruitment.

"America's Army"

Blog post from two weeks ago: DaVita Clinical Research and #InspiredToHelp

Talking about successful social media campaigns... a pretty difficult task given that we mostly remember campaigns that failed and backfired. And that's okay, because it's funny. We'd rather remember someone sharing their funny #MCDstory instead of dealing with the problems of African children by tweeting about the #waterislife campaign.

A very dificult topic to talk about is healthcare, especially when it comes to long-term diseases. DaVita Clinical Research is focussing its work on kidney diseases and launched a social media campaign in March 2014. DaVita Clinical Research is a research institution for kidney diseases that is always looking for participants in their trials and is encouraging scientific exchange.

The campaign contained he hashtag #InspiredToGive and created eighteen videos with (former) participants talking about their experiences with clinical trials and (most importantly) what inspired them to gie their time to clinical research. It allowed participants as well as researchers to share videos and pictures from their experiences with DaVita.

At the same time, DaVita asked communities what inspired them to give back. The results can be seen on their Instagram and Youtube channels. The overall message of the campaign was that anyone can participate in clinical trials and the personal appoach was chosen quite nicely, because audiences are tired of healthcare companies talking TO them. There is not enough caffeine in the world to stay awake during another "We need you for research"-campaign by some big medical association. If there is, on the other hand, content that shows real people talking about their real life experiences with clinical trials, trust-building videos of good-looking researchers and community representatives that talk about how much a clinical trial supports public health, you are more likely drawn to search for more information about that particular institution.

Healthcare companies suffer from a serious lack of trust which is reflected in decreasing participation numbers. In that case it is just a great idea to meet the public's concerns with every-day testimonials and trustworthy statements about how rewarding it is to help sick people by participating in a clinical trial.

Street artists in New York

New York Part 1

First impressions of New York

Not the worst thing to do on the first day in NY: New York Knicks vs. Milwaukee Bucks at Madison Square Garden

And the Empire State Building

East - East River and Brooklyn

South - Downtown Manhattan and the World Trade Center

Shadow of the Empire State Building

North East

North - Uptown Manhattan

North West - Uptown Manhattan and Hudson River

West - Hudson River and New Jersey

Downtown Manhattan, Broklyn on the left, New Jersey on the right and Liberty Island south of Hudson River

Search Engine Optimization on mylifeincanada

Last week's social media lecture dealt with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ways to make one's own website more appealing to giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
To get more attention from search engines, it is important to place keywords - because that's what we do when we search the web, we enter keywords. So what makes mylifeincanada interesting? It sums up the experiences of a German student in a strange environment, delivers awesome pictures from travels and has some off-topic articles about social media and my experiences in the corporate world.

What am I talking about?

Let's focus on the travel-pictures: Keywords would be "city trip", "Canada", "North America", "tourism" and "place of interest", paired with the city's names "Toronto", "Ottawa", "Niagara Falls", as well as "nature", "wildlife", "summer", "Canadian fall" and "coulourful leaves". While adjusting keywords we also have to think about labelling the photos that are shown on the blog. Titles such as "IMG_9160" might help keeping track of my data on the hard drive, but are actually not search engine friendly. The next pictures to be uploaded will be labelled at least with the travel destination's name and another tag such as "spring", "sunny" or something similar. Also we have to make sure not use underscores but hyphens in the labeling because they are not being recognized by Google etc.
We can even check if our keywords work and when the demand is highest by using Google trends.

Where to put the keywords like "Canada", "wildlife" and "nature"?

I have been fairly effective in putting keywords in the title of my blog posts, but there can be way more done. For instance, it is always effective to put keywords in H1, H2 or H3 headlines, I'm going to label my subheaders from now on.
A new page description would also be advantageous to the hit counter, I have changed it from "A German in the great white north - pictures, travelog, university-related stuff" to "Travelog, pictures and advice from a German in Canada: Citytrips, touristy-stuff and beautiful nature shots in the summer, fall and winter in Southern Ontario"
And of course the keywords need to be included into the basic articles, which is pretty difficult when one wants the photos to talk for themselves.

I could do more linking!

The internet consists of links and links are being taken into account when it comes to the value of a webpage to search engines. Therefore I am going to try to post some related stuff on here as often as possible. This should be easy since I'm not the only German studying part-time in Canada. For example, pay a visit to Anne's blog Meeting Canada.

Analytics, Analytics and more Analytics

What post gets the most attention? Why is that? Can I do another post with similar content to reach the same attention? Answering those questions is being supported by Blogger's analytics-tool. It is not as detailed and comfortable as Facebook's analytics but is still offering me all kinds of information about the visitors to my blog - country, operating system, time of access.

Let's see if the changes will work

Niagara Falls in Winter

Mc Donald's and the #McFail

In January of 2012, Mc Donald's launced a campaign with the hashtag #McDStories to encourage fellow tweeters to share their positive experiences with Mc Donald's on the web. At the same time they launched a second campaign with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers. The goal must have been to create a more trustworthy image of the restaurants and to work towards the new "green-initiative" Mc Donald's has going on.

The campaign started with the following post:

'Meet Dirk Giannini, McDonald’s lettuce supplier, as he shows u his life on the farm #MeetTheFarmers http://mcd.to/AyvF4M'

Having the followers set in this certain direction, Mc Donald's tweeted a few hours later:

'When u make something w/pride, people can taste it,' - McD potato supplier #McDStories http://t.co/HaPM5G9F'

...thus starting a huge backlash of tweets with certain, definately non-intended, stories.

Not only were some tweeters sharing stories about their drug-induced snack attacks, a huge part of the tweets with the hashtag #McDStories contained horror-experiences and bashing of the low-quality Mc Donald's fastfood:

'These #McDStories never get old, kinda like a box of McDonald's 10 piece' [@nelo_taylor]

'Watching a classmate projectile vomit his food all over the restaurant during a 6th grade trip. #McDStories' [@jfsmith23]

'I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea.' [@MuzzaFuzza]

Within a few hours the marketing responsibles realized that their hashtag wasn't working as imagined. The situation became worse because the initial #McDStories post was a promoted tweet and badly enough became a "Top Tweet", a tweet that is getting extremely high engagement when people search for a term. This only happened because of the huge interest in this hashtag.

Mc Donald's, interestingly enough, quickly reacted on the misuse of their promotional idea and pulled the campaign only two hours after its launch. After that the number of conversations about it fell from over 1,600 to only a few dozen.

Lessons learned

Even though the #McDStories campaign was pulled, the #MeetTheFarmers hashtag persisted because it had no connection to the backlash that happened.
It seems pretty easy to say by now - but before one launches a featured tweet and one spends thousands of dollars on it, one should think about how a hashtag can be interpreted. This applies even more to a brand that faces perpetual criticism from animal rights- and consumer protection groups.
Instead of the #McDStories campaign, Mc Donald's could have started a competition to send in the most creative customer-stories and have them pubslished on their website, acting like a ruthless editor much like Coca Cola.

Pulling the campaign and keeping silence about it seems to have been the perfect way of responding. Every kind of response to the trashing would have ended in even more media attention and would have helped the horror stories to spread even faster.

As tourist in Cuba Pt2

Manche Tage fangen schon super an, mit dem Sonnenaufgang über der Karibik:

Da es auf Dauer auch langeilig sein kann, die ganze Zeit im Resort abzugammeln, haben wir an einem eintägigen Ausflug nach Camaguey teilgenommen, um auch mal eine kubanische Stadt zu sehen und nicht nur den dazugehörigen Flughafen.

Auf halbem Wege haben wir an einer stillgelegten Zuckerfabrik Halt gemacht und die Früchte der Revolution bestaunt.

Unser erstes Ziel in Camaguey war der Placa de la revolución, auf dem die Errungenschaften von Fidel, Che und Ignacio Agramonte, dem lokalen "Befreier", festgehalten sind.

Leider sieht es abseits des vergleichsweise pompösen Platzes eher schlicht aus...

An dieser Stelle möchte ich erneut auf den "Charme" des Sozialismus hinweisen. Wenn man dann aber einmal in der Innenstadt von Camaguey ist, bietet sich ein ganz anderes Bild, als in den Wohngebieten im Norden der Stadt. Die Straßen strahlen vor Farben und Pflanzenpracht und es finden sich auch erstaunlich viele Touristen. Es ist außerdem gar nicht so einfach, sich in der Innenstadt von Camaguey zurecht zu finden, weil alles sehr verwinkelt gebaut ist und es so gut wie keine geraden Straßen gibt. Der Grund dafür ist, dass die Stadt in der Vergangenheit häufig das Opfer von Piratenüberfällen wurde und zweimal niedergebrannt wurde. Daraufhin wurde sie viele Kilometer weiter in das Landesinnere verlegt und als eine Art Labyrinth gebaut, in dem sich die Freibeuter verlaufen würden.

Vom Parque Ignacio Agramonte hat man einen wunderbaren Ausblick auf die karibische Stadt.

Auf dem Rückweg von unserem Tagesausflug hatte ich dann auch noch die Möglichkeit, die Wohnungen der Mitarbeiter unseres Ressorts zu fotografieren.