Advergames are becoming ever more popular and an increasingly common way of online promotion as they are relatively cheap, and an effective way of engaging consumers. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term, advergames (advertising games) are essentially games that are built around a brand. They are a great promotional tool that can be used to generate brand awareness, launch a new product, or simply reinforce a company’s ethos.

The basic model of the advergame was pioneered in 1995 by a company called Skyworks, who created a game in the web browser and went on to create a business model where the games they built would be supported by the advertising model of the client. Their first project was CandyStand.com, which still gets millions of unique users every month and is a tremendous asset for the client. This was the first evidence of a major brand using games online in such a way.

The main goal of an advergame is to increase awareness of your brand and ultimately sell your product or service, with a successful advergame building traffic and interest in your brand. To achieve these goals there are certain key rules an advergame must adhere to.

Initially, the game has to be as simple and fun as possible. It needs to make the player feel glad he played it and elicit good memories of and feelings of your brand so you benefit from positive product association. Advertising is of course is an essential and relevant part of the game, however it comes secondary to the enjoyment of the game. Although it is expected, players will be turned off if the advertising is too dominant and interferes with the game. Striking the right balance between having fun and getting the intended ‘brand experience’ is important as savvy gamers will pass on games with a brand heavy message and without the support of key influencers, the virality of the game can be seriously hindered.

In order for the game to be successful, you also have to know your audience. A motor racing game will not work if your target market is new mums. Likewise, if you want to get the attention of teenage boys, a parenting game will go down like a lead balloon. By the same token, simply just building a branded advergame and expecting people to play won't be successful. You'll need to promote the game through your website, e-newsletters and through sites and forums that are of interest to the target audience. Repeated traffic will encourage a viral effect, which persuades people to pass on a marketing message by participating with their friends or by word of mouth promotion.

The advergaming industry is moving to mainstream advertising as an increasing number of companies move their budgets online. According to a recent report by PQ Media Research, spending on branded entertainment efforts will surpass $25 billion in 2008 (Business Wire 2008). With modern technology developing at such a fast rate, the possibilities of games are ever expanding. The introduction gaming on smart phones, televisions and cable set top boxes means that there are more and more opportunities for you to reach your target audience with an advergame. Staying ahead of the curve and giving your customers something they cannot find elsewhere will increase retention and loyalty.

Have a look at our case study of an advergame for the movie The Grudge2. The game generated 3,576 site visitors per day. http://on.fb.me/JaaILU

We also designed and built TT3D:Closer to the Edge, a game that was more about creating a conduit beyond the game for advertising. It generated 9,745,920 views in total and won the Screen Awards Best Campaign of the Year FOR A Film in 3D. http://on.fb.me/HPO1vp

The beauty industry used to offer potential customers an opportunity to sample particular products before they commit to buying them. However, sampling has now become a thing of the past as new consumers are looking to social networking sites for prize draws, promotions and freebies. The cosmetics industry has become so varied and competitive that companies have to think of innovative promotional ideas to lure in the paying customers. Consumers are also looking for independent recommendations from more trust-worthy sources rather than spending their hard earned cash on something that may not live up to the hype, and their first port of call is usually social networking sites. As consumers' habits are changing drastically, the fastest in history in fact, businesses are struggling to keep up with it all and the beauty industry hasn't completely adapted to the digital world in terms of online promotions.

Social networking sites can help with the promotion of a cosmetic no end. Through digital promotions, beauty brands are able to target their desired audience and host product giveaways and competitions on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Brands can get customers to 'like' their page before they are allowed to enter a competition, giving them a larger following and social reach for any future promotions they may wish to roll out. Hosting promotions on social platforms also allows for a greater engagement with their audience as entrants are able to post comments onto their pages and brands can respond, whether it be accepting positive feedback or managing complaints.

A company who has seen how effective social media can be is L'oreal who has embraced digital promotions and hired their first digital director in luxury brands. L'oreal released this statement "Listening and engaging with our audience is crucial and we have embraced the opportunity digital media gives us to communicate with our customers".

Why should the Health & Beauty look into Digital promotions more?

• There has been a significant increase into internet users (1.3 billion users worldwide)
• Broadband made the world faster and more powerful
• With the Internet being faster and portable it then allowed it to become SOCIAL
• Word of mouth became something that can be done anywhere, anytime on any device.
• Create relationships and grow advocacy
• There are 95000 beauty blogs
• Women aged 35-49 are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook
• Over 50% of Women over 50 engage in social media more than girls 18 and under.
• Twitter has 50 million users
• The digital world affects all aspects of society
• It has the power of recommendation
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendation which are now written online.
• Skincare delivers 31 million hits on Google a year.
• Demand for online Beauty advice, help, news, tips and knowledge is huge
• Beauty brands are now becoming involved with digital tools and gadgets.

Will some of our favourite beauty brands adapt to digital life in 2012? Only time will tell.

In an increasingly social world, it's no secret that networks such as Facebook and Twitter play an extremely important role in the way businesses communicate with their audience and customers. They are a key tool and have a strong influence in today's society, especially in industries such as marketing, where it's all about getting your views heard.

As social media evolves, the power of the everyday user is growing and those with a high influence could be invaluable to your company. Our friends and peers are shaping all of our decisions, from where to go to dinner to what computer to buy, and this hasn't gone un-noticed. The importance of having the attention of these influential users is clearly becoming more apparent to businesses, with marketers dedicating a lot of time and money to key influencers in social media.

Influence is moving from a loose term to something that is becoming more understood, with companies such as Klout looking at users different social network accounts, including Facebook and Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and Instagram to give their influence within the social networking sphere a mathematical value, defining influence as the 'ability to drive action'.

However, simply tracking key influencers is not enough to make a difference. Engaging with key influences is the key to making them work for your business. Companies need to have a thorough knowledge of the individual influencers, what interests them and their audiences and most importantly how to engage with them. With this, comes understanding why they are influencers. Monitoring and responding with these opinion leaders is to participate in your audience's social experience that will in turn foster relationships.

Ultimately, the aim of the game is to optimise and improve your presence within your desired market and amongst its audience. Connecting with key influencers in the right way that engages them and their following is the way to do this. Nurturing these relationships will improve your influence as a company and thus returns.

Do you eat to live, or live to eat? If the latter you’ll no doubt know of the numerous sites, blogs, apps and networks where you can virtually discover new gastronomic delights, share your opinions, upload photos of what you're eating (I know it's frowned upon, but yes I have done it!) and discuss the minutiae of cuisines, restaurants and chefs. But given the consumer appetite, how smart are the eateries being in exploiting social and digital media to generate new consumers and keep regulars loyal?

As a food lover I'm always keen to keep up with what's good in the world of cooking and dining, so checking user ratings and reviews on Yelp or Toptable is always on the cards. But nothing beats word of mouth recommendation. Except a free meal. Which is why I was impressed when my wife's tweet about our lunch at Benares was followed up by an invite from a new local Indian Restaurant, whose head chef had trained at Benares, to attend their opening event. Smart move, nice keyword tracking and lovely food too.

Twitter is a great way of tracking live contextual tweets, and creating direct consumer engagement. When Public House (@Public_HouseN1), just off the busy Upper Street in Islington, were looking to create more awareness and footfall, we were able to design a social engagement program specifically to target local diners looking for their modern British cuisine, and also their (frankly brilliant) Sunday roast. By actively seeking out and responding to people looking for a cracking north London roast, and tweeting a user offer designed to convert interest to custom, we were able to more than treble the covers on a Sunday.

So Twitter is great for targeting and attracting custom, but what else could restaurants be doing? Well, Facebook is a good place to start and social ads can provide an amazingly cost effective way to create some initial interest. By being extremely targeted, you can attract the ideal diner. Babur, a two rosette Indian restaurant in south London, have been able to create a solid foundation by combining very targeted ads - designed to seek out locals as well as foodie fans of the better known West End restaurants - with a sharable voucher tab. Simply print the voucher and get a great anniversary discount. And as the widget is already on Facebook, it’s not a great stretch to introduce social crowdsourcing with a simple share mechanic.

Geolocation platforms too offer potential to drive custom, especially informal drop-ins, with specials broadcast in the local area. Public House have used this extremely well, and for a relatively small local venue to have 18 concurrent Foursquare checkins on a Friday night is no mean feat!

So what are the lessons?

Social let's you focus on your key market, so play to your strengths in terms of location, cuisine, dishes and known personalities. Roots at N1 piqued my interest off the back of Atul Kutcher's Benares!

Remember it's not a numbers game, a million fans or followers is no use if you can only serve 40 covers a night - it's all about bums on seats. Make the most of the free networks which are out there: Yelp, Foursquare, Foodspotting etc.

And broadcast more than just menu items - users like to be engaged, whether it's the eccentric ravings of Johnnie Mountain (a very switched on guy when it comes to new and traditional media, which has helped generate buzz for his most recent venture, The English Pig) or cookery tips from chef.

If you want to find out more about social media marketing or have any questions drop a tweet to John Lyons @johnnieego or the company account @Brandmovers_uk. We enjoy new food experiences as much as creating social strategies.

For those of you who have not heard of egoFolio, it is currently being used as a photo management system by a major international Photo Agency based in the UK, and has been in development since June 2010. But what does that actually mean? Well imagine having a system which allows photographers to take photos of your favourite celebrity and then within minutes, upload those photos via a dynamically created FTP account or secure web interface so they can be sold to media companies for use in their material.

OK so it does not sound that impressive yet, there must be a million systems that do this sort of thing. So lets imagine a system where each user has permission to only access and manage just their photos; that on uploading new photos, egoFolio automatically reads XMP, IPTC and EXIF meta data from the images (hidden content stored within the image describing who took it, what its about and location etc) and then lets you re-write that data back into the image when you publish. (including automatically branded with your companies name) Not only that, all images that have been uploaded have been branded with a watermark automatically.

Still not impressed? You certainly are a tough crowd to please! Having the system do all this clever stuff is pointless if you are unable to sell these images to the media. egoFolio not only deals with the image, it then can be integrated with popular systems such as Distribution Manager, IDS and can be published to the egoFolio sales front end branded to your company. A full audit of where it has been sent Is stored within the system so if you can’t remember if you have sent it to an important newspaper, you can just read the image publish history.

Once a media company has decided to use your image there is no need to record that data separately, each user is given a commission percentage on creation of their account (which can be changed on a photo by photo basis) so when an image is sold you can enter the sales data directly into egoFolio and it will automatically let that user know an item has been sold and allow the administrators to generate sales reports so they can see what has been paid and what is still to be paid.

The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that at the start of this blog, I called egoFolio an asset management system rather than a photo management system, this is because egoFolio has been designed to also allow the management of other media as well. Want to sell video or audio? Simply turn on the egoFolio transcoding engine and when a person uploads a video or audio file, have it automatically converted to a playable format branded with your logo.

So what’s the future of egoFolio? The main focus at the moment is to make the accounting and reporting side a lot better. There is no point reinventing the wheel and since everybody uses Sage to run there accounts, why not link egoFolio directly up to Sage? (So if an image is marked as sold the system can send the information to sage to generate an invoice and then have Sage data passed back to egoFolio when an invoice is page.) Or what about the ability to manipulate the images directly in egoFolio? If you don’t like the drunken student who has decided to try to get in the paper and has managed to get his head in the picture simply crop it directly in the system.

We believe egoFolio has filled a gap in the asset management market, is unqiue, and is only going to get better, hopefully you agree (providing you understood this techie - who is now going to be hidden from the world for another year.)

If you are interested in egoFolio or have any questions, please contact one of our sales reps on 0844 2474 120 or email studio@brandmovers.co.uk. (Or even tweet us on @ricky_reeves or the company account @Brandmovers_uk.)

Ricky Reeves
Technical Director
Brandmovers Europe Limited

For those of you who regularly follow our blog, or know any of us personally, the fact that we love Foursquare isn’t news. If you’re a client you’ll know how it’s been one of the many platforms and technologies that we’ve tested to breaking point to assess how it might help engage consumers to your brand or product’s benefit. You probably also know we were there in October last year when more than 300 of us got together in a bar in town to check-in concurrently and unlock the first Super swarm badge in the UK. You might even know we joined a small team of industry specialists and enthusiasts in seeking to plan the next big thing with superswarm organiser @cpchannel. Or you may have seen the cross-social promotion we’ve developed for the release of TT3D: Closer To The Edge which includes a Foursquare feature with the movie’s cinema chain partner.

Yes, we do Foursquare. We love it. Yes, we’ve had in-office arguments, and yes I threw my toys out the pram when I was ousted as mayor of our London office whilst on Honeymoon. So what next? Well, following up on an intriguingly mysterious tweet from @ThePaulSutton yesterday I was anxious to find out this very morning at the Tower of London. And so…

History (formerly The History Channel) today launched a unique and exciting new partnership with Foursquare, with the aim of attracting people “who have not traditionally engaged with history”. And how have they done this? By tagging 600 known and undiscovered historical locations around the capital, with users unlocking a new “HISTORY <3 London” badge by checking into four or more tagged locations – each of which has been furnished with fascinating tips and historical insights. But it goes further. Badge owners are automatically entered into a prize draw (so good luck to @rheaj who unlocked the badge during the presentation, much to everyone’s delight and amusement – well, not everyone, actually, where’s my badge?) and there are currently over 20 partner attractions offering exclusive discounts and rewards to participants. It’s on message for the brand, engaging and offers something to the dedicated or accidental participant. What’s not to like and admire?

It’s going to be fascinating to see how this one pans out, but for me it represents a real coming of age of the platform here in the UK, and a hope that this becomes the first of several, but not too many, opportunities to reward consumers with the much coveted badges which have been more-or-less denied us over this side of the pond. Though History did concede having their US operation tie-up a deal with Foursquare previously made this a lot smoother than may have otherwise be the case. Thankfully we have a pretty well connected US office too.

If you want to find out more about location-based marketing or have any questions drop a tweet to John Lyons @johnnieego or the company account @Brandmovers_uk.

Miso, the niche cousin of ‘GetGlue’ and the ‘Foursquare’ equivalent for television, is the application to use when watching your favourite media content on your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad or Android. Miso has a similar concept to other check-in applications, enabling you to check into what you’re watching, earn points and unlock virtual badges.

Aside from the familiar check-in concept, there is an additional social element which allows users to join a community of fellow fanatics of a television programme. Users can like, comment and reply to each other’s comments as well as competing for a position in the programmes leaderboard

So why would anyone use Miso? What makes it different from tweeting about a programme on Twitter with a hashtag or talking about your thoughts on a Facebook fan page? I always find myself multi-tasking by using social media in some way during television programmes. In other words, I’m looking for extra value to contribute to my viewing experience.

As a result, I’ve found checking-in and interacting on Miso far more instantaneous, compact and relevant compared to Facebook or Twitter. That’s not to say that Twitter or Facebook is irrelevant, it just acts as a great accompaniment to Miso.

If a television show is relatively new or unknown, Miso is the place to start as it presents the chance to start a small, niche community. Also, Miso gives you a chance to communicate about a show on multiple platforms - by checking-in and commenting on a programme and then posting it on Twitter or Facebook, you present the chance to synergise with these platforms. This ensures that you do not miss the chance to gossip with fellow fans and create multiple conversations, all of which contribute to improving your social experience.

Apart from the social niceties, Miso presents various PR and marketing opportunities for the entertainment sector. From today, Miso will be running a promotion for the History Channel UK by acting as the engagement and social channel for their fourth series of “Ice Road Truckers”. In return for checking-in and interacting, users can unlock a virtual badge and be entered into a prize draw to win a Sony PS3 console - all in exchange for their Miso mingling!

This is the first UK promotion by Miso, but with the backing of Google Ventures and the current ‘check-in’ craze, it’s sure to be a success. If you’d like to discuss your thoughts on marketing opportunities or your user experience with Miso, drop a tweet to @Brandmovers_uk.

Recently we created a Facebook Connect competition site for HomeAway, the UK’s number 1 holiday rentals site. The competition was to promote ‘Grantourismo’ - two globetrotting travel writers who inhabit HomeAway’s holiday rental homes on their travels, in order to experience culture, history and cuisine first hand.

The competition was in the form of a travel-based quiz, derived from some of the destinations of the Grantourismo tour. Not only do users test their knowledge, but they have the chance to win instant prizes and be entered into a star prize draw for £1,000 towards a holiday, in one of HomeAway’s 210,000+ holiday rental properties.

In order to enter the competition, the quiz is linked and connected directly with Facebook, which enables users to publish their results to their news feed which in turn creates a viral effect. Also the site has a ‘Like’ feature, which connects people further and turns them into a Facebook fan of the HomeAway page.

The competition has been a great success in terms of fans and users. In the first few weeks of the competition, the fan base increased by approximately 70%.

To see the Facebook Connect site visit http://www.homeawayquiz.co.uk. If you’re looking for something similar to this promotion, or would like to discuss it in more depth drop a tweet to @Brandmovers_uk.