Phil Lloyd, Chief Customer Officer of Snatch discusses how brands are starting up a different kind of relationship with millennials where they take the lead.
Unless you’ve been living on a remote island somewhere, most people are aware of Pokemon GO – the app that brought augmented reality (AR) to the fore. For marketers, rather than fixating on the mechanic of the game, the question was how to capitalise on this hyper-engaged audience using their phone, everywhere and anywhere they go.
Since advertising began, we’ve spoken about how passive or active consumers are. The fact is that a new generation of consumers has emerged and ‘active’ doesn’t quite cut it. This millennial audience know what they want, and more importantly what they don’t. That’s why when the world went seemingly potty chasing Pikachu et al around all day and night, some of us saw the very delivery method that will enable brands to engage effectively with generations to come. When people engage with a brand via a game (as they do in Snatch), it’s still marketing. But it’s marketing on consumers’ terms.
Gamification (for marketing purposes) isn’t about consumers having their eyeballs blasted by a 30 second ad. It’s an entirely different interaction that centralises around the player and gives them control. Giving them the choice of which brands they connect with, as well as when and where it happens.
Relinquishing control is a fairly alien prospect for the majority of us in the industry. We spend hours mulling over messages, multiple adjectives to convey ‘fun’ and whether we invest in James Corden or some other current celeb to relate with our target audience. For millennials, it’s a different ballgame. Broadcasting, however ‘now’ the content is, will be cast aside if that millennial doesn’t want to view/read it. They are changing the very parameters of marketing that we’ve built our careers on – but it isn’t bad news.
The difference between millennials and younger people, compared to the rest of us mere mortals is that they know their worth as a consumer. No matter how strategic, integrated and in-stream we think the advertising we’re delivering to them is – on Facebook or on a Buzzfeed article – this group of consumers know and understand what’s happening. They’re a savvy bunch and, as such, demand a whole lot more – be that better content, more incentives or a whole new relationship.
The emergence of ad blockers stems from this group clearly that tells us something. They are more conscious than any other previous group of consumers. They know what they want, and more importantly, what turns them off. So why keep dishing up the same tactics if we know these consumers want something else?
I focus in on millennials, as from looking at Snatch’s early adopters the majority of them were thirty or under. That’s not to say all gamers are millennials or indeed Snatch players – on the contrary, my retired mum frequently plays the game and loves it. But gamification does provide an environment that millennials have come to trust and want to spend time in.
What makes gaming very interesting is how immersive it is. At pretty much every industry event, advertisers discuss consumers’ dwindling attention span and how content should be just seconds long in order to drum home a message before the consumer switches off. In a game, it’s quite the opposite. Players are wholly consumed – often playing for hours on end.
What Pokémon GO nailed was mainstreaming augmented reality – making gaming even more relevant and addictive, transporting a consumer even further into the game – transforming their current location into a virtual reality. Brands that enter this space for marketing purposes really could be on to something, as people are so tuned in and can play wherever and whenever they choose. The penny dropped.
Gamification and AR, for many marketers, is still a big unknown – partly perhaps as it is new territory but also because it’s hard to let go of the reigns and put the consumer in the driving seat. It is by no means the silver bullet for all marketing. Each channel has its purpose. But what’s clear is that millennials are reinventing the value exchange and ultimately they know (as well as we do) that brands need to change their tact and go to them and ask to be let in, versus bashing the door down.
By Phil Lloyd
Chief Customer Officer
Snatch