Welcome to Revolution's viral game of the week

by Jim McNiven, revolutionmagazine.com 26-Jun-09, 14:38

LONDON - As Revolution's resident games expert, I'll be choosing my top casual title for you to enjoy every Friday afternoon, writes Kerb managing director Jim McNiven. It's an area I've lived and breathed for the past decade, during which time my company has built in excess of 50 viral games for brands including PlayStation, Channel 4 and EA.

I'm about to open my blog account with Revolution in a way that i don't mean to go on. This blog is going to be a short, snappy, entirely impartial and light-hearted distraction from the rest of the hard hitting marketing news contained within this site. It will, I promise, bring to your attention the very best casual games plucked from around the web - ranging from commercial 'advergames' to indie games built by the ubiquitous kid in his bedroom. However, if you'll indulge me, this initial entry will be long-winded, self promotional and perhaps even more unforgivably it contains marketing metrics.

Ten years on since our first viral game, the world of digital marketing has changed in many ways, and no more so than in the acceptance of viral games as a legitimate marketing tool. It seems bizarre now, but in the early days we seemed to spend meeting after meeting desperately trying to explain the concept of 'a viral game' to sceptical marketeers. These days it seems like even the smallest most specialist brands are hell bent on having a viral game and we spend a sizeable chunk of our time discussing with them whether it's really suitable or not.

But, with the huge traffic we get with viral games - how could it ever be unsuitable?

As a rule of thumb; if you are aiming your campaign at a precise target market (especially B2B campaigns where you are trying to hit people working in a particular role) or trying to market to a specific geographic location then you are unlikely to see anything like the benefit that we can give to a more mainstream brand targeting an international audience. We find on average that around 4 to 5 per cent of our traffic on a viral game comes from the UK. If you want to advertise a specialist product or service to this audience you would see your returns diminish even further. Depending on what you are trying to promote and who you want to reach there is a point where it begins to make more sense to do a media buy and forget trying to reach your audience with a naturally seeded viral game.

This doesn't mean that viral games don't work though. Far from it. Viral games are a decent marketing tool. You just need to be sure that you are choosing the right tool for the job. So where do viral games work best?

Firstly, if your product is aimed at an international (especially a worldwide audience) then you will probably not find a more cost effective way to engage with potential customers.

Secondly, whilst we are all aware that games these days are played by people of all ages, if you are aiming at under 30 year-olds then a viral game is a bit of a no-brainer.

Finally, if you happen to be in the entertainment industry and your product is music, movies or (best of all) games then you can pretty much guarantee anybody who plays your viral game, wherever they are and however old, is likely to be exactly your target market.

We are lucky to work with PlayStation who have a very wide geographic target audience of gamers. So my completely biased game of the week is one that we launched to promote a new title release exactly three weeks ago. To date it has achieved 1.4 million unique visits of which 55 per cent are within our target geographic, 11.6 minutes average user dwell time, a click-through rate of 25 per cent and over 100 articles on games blogs and games industry sites.

Revolution's game of the week: Infamous

Next week a game that we had nothing to do with I promise.