Video: How Gamification Can Enhance Brand Awareness
Though not a one-size-fits-all proposition, gamification can increase brand and content awareness in a number of ways in the OTT video market when deployed strategically and custom-fit to the content in question, according to Google Labs Creative Collaborator Nathan Phillips and Viacom VP of Product Management Isaac Josephson in this excerpt from their Streaming Media East 2016 panel. Josephson warns, however, "We should be careful not to conflate gamification with games."
Learn more about OTT gamification at Streaming Media West.
Read the transcript of the clip above:
Nathan Phillips: The way I think about gamification is as an amusement park ultimately. There's a big sign in the front of media landscape and that might have a name of a brand on it or some sort theme that connects this experience. You walk in and then there are all these disparate content experiences. In an amusement park, it might be different rides. The way it works here is different video pieces of content. It could be series, could be one-offs, maybe there's a Twitter experience over here. The goal, I think, is to get people to enter into a media landscape, or an ecosystem, or whatever word you want to use for it. The more they play, the more they engage, the more value they get out of it. That ultimately maps to a gamification model in a cool way, especially when you think about it the way give gamification exists in our everyday life.
Your credit card is a game. Your cell phone bill is a game. People are very used to engaging with things, getting a reward, and then having that motivate more participation. There's always gamification going on. I think it's about can we identify it, and then elevated to the user is aware of it, and it doesn't feel necessarily like Farmville where it's like, "I'm playing a game but I'm engaging with this and the more I do it the cooler it is."
Isaac Josephson: Right. We should be careful not to conflate gamification with games. For Nick and Nick Jr. games are a big part of the experience. I wouldn't call them fodder for more engagement with the brand. I would call them increasingly linked to the heart and soul of the brand because that's what kids ages 3 to 11 like. To your point, Nathan, gamification is just simply the act of taking an investment that your audience has already made thus far and using that investment to draw them deeper into the experience. That you can and should do anyway.
Nathan Phillips: I think our audience is so savvy and so immersed in all this content and everything we've gathered, just being nerdy at this point is a form of medication. The fact that we can sit down and identify someone as a fellow player and make Star Trek references back and forth that's great fodder for the Star Trek brand to be able to build on.
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