Attended the Future Generations Track for Day 2.

Having good memories of Day 1′s cozy sessions, I went in, expecting good stuff. After all, the audience today would be like minded students, people who would be more in-the-know about digital marketing.

I must say that the questions were more engaging than those from the Suits outside. Some pertinent ones, some forgettable ones.

Had a bit of an issue with the presenting companies though.

Early in the morning, we were greeted by Yahoo! employees, desperately trying to up the cool quotient of their company culture and environment. I’m sorry guys, coming from a design background, I can say safely that almost every single little design company has a culture like that. Fun, do what you want, as long as the job gets done, flexi (but sometimes long) working hours, work from home, crazy in office parties, pranks, and what not. Are you trying to make like Google? Not many companies have food less than 150m from any employee, or resident gourmet chefs. I must say maybe Yahoo! has a very good (and concerned HR department though).

Yahoo! also did a significant amount of throwing impressive looking figures at me. Show me one person in the room full of students who can actually appreciate the figures, and not let them go totally over their heads. For one thing, don’t show us statistics without some comparisons. Show us the numbers, sure! But how about in comparison with your main competitors such as Google or Microsoft, perhaps? Put things in relative perspective.

Still, that was not the thing that irked me the most.

I absolutely hated it when OMD threw us a surprise “competition”. “Hey guys! We’re going to break you up into groups now so that you can work on this fictitious client brief…in which you’ll get to come up with a cool campaign!”

Along the way, they threw in the incentives – a damn ugly jacket and random PC games. I wished they had been more honest about it. Obviously, in game advertising was a niche that the company would like to delve into. Obviously, they wanted to get some ideas from the youths of today. Fair enough. Just don’t try and disguise it as a fun game for us. Be honest, come upfront and say,
“Guys, we’re totally out of our element here. You’re young, and tuned in with what the gamers of today want. Help us come up with a campaign that we can use, and if what you present is good, we’ll give you a chance to take ownership of your ideas and execute it.” There. Plain, simple and most importantly, honest.

There’s no need for cheesy freebies, regardless of monetary value. Portraying the very same activity in another light would have been sufficient for me to want to work on their project. Enough of the fakery and the blatant announcement by the organizers at the end about how OMD “has not gotten all of the mahjong papers and are really interested in keeping your ideas, so please do not throw them away”.

As it turns out, every single group came up with very predictable ideas on how to entice gamers to visit an online Fast Food website for click to order deliveries. I’m really not too sure what possessed them to think that a modern, fast food logo/drive through could be incorporated into games that have their settings in ANCIENT HISTORY. This is not freaking Universal Theme Park guys. I cannot deal with incongruent elements side by side.

I’ve spent the last few months observing. I think gamers are in general, lazy… but often smart people. Smart people are lazy simply because they are always thinking of better ways to do things without the extra effort. They want instant gratification. They can sit there for hours. Whatever it is, if you want them to engage in it during a game, it must be as fast, as painless, and requires as little thought as possible (aka simple to execute and least distracting from the game). If they like it, they develop a habit that will be hard to extinguish. They’re already addicted to their games, so you know that’s one touch-point that you can always reach them.

What I wanted to say on the spot, if I had actually been presenting. If I had been, say, oh, third group to go. Having listened to the first two groups, I realized that all of them were trying desperately to incorporate the Fast Food element INTO THE GAME ITSELF. But the brief had been simply to
1. Up awareness of the online delivery site.
2. Drive sales.

Who said anything about having to have the component as a blatant product placement IN the game?

I would have asked permission to throw my group’s mahjong paper out right away (if we’d been going along the lines of in game placement) and advised the client to think about it differently.

I know you wanted to incorporate something into the game, but let us try this a different way.
Let’s just have your Fast Food company logo on the top right/bottom right corner of the screen of a popular online game.
+Gamers click on the logo, the order website springs up in window.
+They order their food (steps must be very simple, perhaps a click to call function, or auto log-in membership so that repeated sign ins are unnecessary).
+Close the window. Back to game.
+Food is delivered.
=Company sales up
+Gamer satisfies hunger
+Everyone is happy.

This is acceptable (but in this case might not drive sales).

This is tacky, but still ok.

This is not. Don’t try to piss gamers off by placing blatant products in their game (especially if it is not contextually relevant AT ALL). If I were a gamer, I’d imagine I’d have some cognitive dissonance when I see this.

I (unsurprisingly) could not find an image that depicted the odd marriage of a modern Fast Food restaurant right smack in the middle of ancient medieval Fantasy characters, so I had to do up a rough one. Can you visualize the wonderful gaming experience now?

As a gamer, I am really going to go into that Macdonald’s and click on a fictitious menu (in the middle of my game) and wow! real life food gets delivered!

Too complicated, too intrusive, and in the case of a game like Warcraft, just plain wrong!

That’s all. Continuing on the presentation note, there was seriously bad time management on the part of the presenting students. The moderator had to resort to mock shoe throwing, frenzied hand gestures, and I am pretty sure he was about to mock throw some cold water on some of the groups who acknowledged that their time was up but seemed intent on going through every single word written down anyway.

All in all, I wished I could have gotten more out of the company presentations that I couldn’t already find out on the web, or books, or something! But what they did present got me thinking of other things, so I had quite a bit of fun there.

Nonetheless, it is always exciting to know that subjects like social media are slowly filtering into relatively large scaled conferences like this. It is still in its infancy, and any recognition by the industry is always a good thing.

Tags: adtech, competition, in game advertising, warcraft, gaming, behaviour, presentation, conference, social media, Yahoo!, OMD