Are games the future of Advertising?

March 11, 2008

You see a billboard or flier with a slightly out of the ordinary message and an internet address. When you get home and go to the website, the out of the ordinary message becomes downright strange.

After digging through the site for an hour, you run across a link that you’ve missed multiple times. The reason you missed the link is because it’s hidden – you realize that it was supposed to be difficult for you to find it.

You click the link, and a video comes up on your monitor. It’s a young woman in a dark room, and she looks scared. The video is a message to whoever happens to find it. It asks for help and tells you what to do next.

You’re either a character in an action adventure movie or you’ve just been pulled into an alternative reality game (ARG).

So, what is an ARG I won’t go over what is well covered elsewhere, but I will say that it is one of the next steps in marketing.

You can read about Trent Reznor, from Nine inch Nails, and the ARG that he lead in wired magazine’s article and get a fairly good impression of the strength of this form of marketing and what it reveals about the future.

Potential customers, bruised by years of abusive marketing, are no longer affected by the repeated message. And, smart marketers are taking advantage of new trends by addressing them directly. By making the message, and the sales, and all of the negative things attached to “marketing” secondary to the service it provides.

In other words, Trent Reznor gets it. He doesn’t want to ram his albums down people’s throats – he’s trying to take part in a new form of entertainment. And that entertainment has reinvigorated his career.

This is attached, I think, to the rising culture of free and goes a distance toward answering Chris Brogan’s question: “When we’re all done with advertising as a business model, what will come next?”

Let me know what you think.

Posted by flowersjustin | Filed Under blog