Instagram, Snapchat, and the new age of game marketing

Above: Liam Neeson in the Clash of Clans ad.

Image Credit: Supercell

GamesBeat: Have you seen anything out there you would consider clever? I don’t know if a Super Bowl ad is clever or brute force as far as mobile games are concerned.

Vorhaus: There’s been some clever buying of TV time. The DraftKings guys have been very smart at what they’ve been buying on ESPN. I liked the Clash TV ad in the Super Bowl. Last year they did something even smarter, which is they bought pre-Super Bowl time. It’s so much cheaper.

I would love to say with a straight face that I loved that Kate Upton TV ad and let people in the blogosphere pile on me about what an asshole I am, but I actually thought the ad itself was horrible. There are plenty of places to see T&A. Tell me something about the game.

I don’t think there’s a lot of clever stuff out there, though. What there ought to be is more of a game, somehow, involved in marketing these games. I always had this vision of Pogo sending a million people in the United States a little scratch-off card. What’s that cost, 20 cents apiece? You could go on Pogo, play a certain game, play the first couple of levels or answer the first few trivia questions or whatever it was, and then the scratch-off thing in the mail would be the final game piece. You could do something similar with CCGs. But nobody’s made a game out of game marketing. I think it’s too bad.

GamesBeat: From the department of plain strange marketing, I wrote a story about Flaregames from Germany launching Royal Revolt 2 in South Korea. The South Korean publisher that worked with them got them a bunch of preorders, and then they also had a famous South Korean rapper do a video about the game. They got into the top five.

Vorhaus: I like that kind of stuff. If you can find emerging bands or emerging guys that you don’t have to pay a fortune to—I’m not going to pay Kim Kardashian kind of money. But if you go after an up-and-coming artist or model or something—I love stunt advertising. Word of mouth is so important. Good old Cal Tech stunts—Like, how cool would it be for the Dots guys to hack into a Times Square billboard and just have Dots up there for an hour?

All that stuff generates so much press. You look at the Kim Kardashian thing, they did a great job with Kim, but the press just gave it to them. They covered it like crazy. Or Flappy Bird. Everybody made it sound like it was this huge viral hit, but it was a huge viral hit that was driven by the popular press. Every traditional press outlet covered it. I’d love to see people do more stuff like that.

Maybe we have unfortunately gotten so far into analytics, so far into CPI, so far into our Excel spreadsheets that very few game marketers – I’m particularly thinking of mobile, outside of console and PC – have really figured out any brilliant breakthrough creative ideas or associations. You look at all the great stuff that a company like Nike has done over the years, or Apple. Where’s Gung Ho’s version of that kind of advertising? Nowhere.

Above: The hardware has the polish of Sony’s storied consumer-electronics expertise.

Image Credit: Sony Computer Entertainment

GamesBeat: Have you thought about where things might go in the future with something like virtual reality?

Vorhaus: I’m a big fan of VR, both personally and professionally. I’ve seen a lot of demos. I just went to a Morpheus demo. It was awesome. They showed me two cute things, just moving around worlds, but then they showed me something called London Heist, made by one of their London studios. It’s just you and a TV set and the goggles. In the 3D world you’re standing behind a big desk, like a robber baron would have. There’s bullets in drawers, a flashlight, things you can hover over and click. They’re using the Move controllers. You’d click on the flashlight, spy around the room, see someone and shoot at them in 3D. It was really cool. You could lean in and dodge, and as your body moved the character in the game would move. It seemed like it was right on the edge of being a place I could run around. It was almost a game.

I’ve seen Reload Studios’ games. I’ve seen some demos from the Jaunt VR guys. I’ve seen a lot of Oculus stuff. Everything I see is better than what I saw before. Reload Studios has this super cool tank game. It’s like World of Tanks meets Jak & Daxter, kind of cartoonish in a Toy Story way.

I find my game-playing is better in a VR environment. The real multidimensionality makes me better at aiming and dodging and not falling off a track. I’m not saying everybody has that experience, but I do. And I think the applications beyond gaming are huge — travel, training. You could do soccer practice there, practice headers or blocking the goal with VR equipment.

GamesBeat: To bring it back to marketing, do you think there’s something equivalent to banner ads for virtual reality?

Vorhaus: Anywhere you have video advertising. The idea that you’d put on a pair of goggles and watch an ad is not crazy at all. It’ll be more compelling, I think. Right now there are already B-to-B examples. We already have companies creating virtual reality demos of their products, using VR as a hook to get people to try it. A company that I’m involved in, they went to a conference and handed out all these Google Cardboard boxes. You went to a website on your Android phone and slipped it in this little Google Cardboard VR reader and there was a demo of their ad technology. It was cool.