64% of people say they’ve been influenced to buy something by watching a video online. 52% of buying decisions can be traced back to Facebook. That was before the pandemic.

Digital Advertising

Advertising has been taking its share of digitalization for some time, display, social media, video, email marketing, etc., nothing new, except that the trend has been dramatically accelerated by the recent pandemic. Staying home, social distancing, the usage of digital devices has surged and consumer behaviour shifted. Take the country first affected by Covid-19 as an example. In China, where consumers spend almost two-thirds of their media time online, Tencent, one of the world's largest social media companies operating mainly in China, has its digital ad revenues in the first quarter increased by 32% year-on-year. As the country reopens, its ad market is predicted to grow by 8.4% – even after COVID-19 is accounted for, a figure still larger than the 8% ad growth forecast for the US pre-coronavirus. Now we are getting a picture of how the world’s advertising industry will be restructured in the post-pandemic era.

But why do we need it?

Unlimited geographic coverage and transmission speed, interaction, and engagement, measurability, and flexibility, data-collection.

Social media video advertisements have become standard in the industry and video ads in 2020 on Facebook & Co. are more creative than ever.

The video of George Floyd’s last minutes going viral is the living proof of how digital channels enable information to travel at the speed of light regardless of the physical distance. 

How Burger King became a star on Twitter has shown us how simple interaction and engagement can generate proximity between brands and customers.

Marketing Analytics tools probably know us better than our partners and big data might as well be smarter and faster in making decisions than human brains.

Digital advertising is reshaping our lives in various ways, and there is more to spice things up.

Gamification

Gamification as a branch of digital advertising is the process of adding games or game-like elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation according to Merriam-Webster. 

Entertaining as it possibly could be, gamification can be employed on websites, apps, social media, physical stores, events, email, sometimes with offline activities involved. It engages customers in games that trigger a sense of excitement. Taking advantage of classical conditioning, gamification encourages thrill-seeking customers to link their positive perceptions of the games to the brands, which motivates their further engagement with the brands and leads to higher brand awareness and conversions.

Vodafone Ireland, working with Appetite Creative Solutions at the time, launched a treasure hunt game campaign with both digital and offline involvement. Users willingly went to the physical stores and learned about the new X-plan as a process of the game, to compete for a brand new iPhone X. At the end of the campaign, footfall increased by 75 players per store on average, there were over 3000 articles being shared and over 1 million views of the game video, more importantly, the shares of participants using IOS and Android are captured respectively as well as other valuable information such as the contract renewal date of the participants, helping Vodafone understand its under-25 customers as precise and well-rounded as possible.

Find more about our Vodafone Campaign here.

There are also digital-only games, such as KitKat running games or Lego playable ads, customers play with the featured-in-game products as a source of entertainment, they linger for a longer time on the websites, along with more engagement and social sharing.

All the gamification cases above are subject to the same principles, achievable, engaging, entertaining, and rewarding. Customers only get hooked when the games bring joy and offer a possibility of winning.

At the end of the day, gamification is about providing more dynamic and enjoyable content in exchange for customers’ attention for the brand and their willingness to share data, thank god, it is not like a space business that requires the most talented engineers since it could be as simple as a poll. Though there is no one-fits-all approach in gamification. Based on the different objectives and available channels of each brand, it needs to be exploited accordingly as a part of companies’ digital marketing strategies to entrench the brands’ presence and facilitate actions such as registrations, purchase and so forth, in a world where digital marketing is becoming increasingly relevant.