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The Game Agency: integrating gaming into mainstream marketing
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To continue this week's theme of the use of video games outside of the traditional gaming market, I interviewed Steve Baer, Co-founder of The Game Agency. The Game Agency (TGA) creates games to integrate into corporate marketing programs to enhance brand value, increase customer loyalty, and drive innovation.
With Joe McDonald, Steve founded TGA in 2007. Prior to founding TGA, both Steve and Joe were at Atari. During the 2006 Christmas season, Burger King launched a 3-pack of Xbox 360 games that they sold in their restaurants as a means to increase foot traffic. The games prominently featured the Burger King brand and sold for $3.99 with a value meal purchase and $5.99 without a value meal purchase. (An average Xbox 360 game sells for $49 - $69.)
The Burger King game pack sold 3.2 million copies, making it the best -selling game of the 2006 holiday season. In addition, Burger King increased profits by 40% for the 4th quarter. The CEO contributed the entire profit increase to the video game pack. Seeing this kind of success, Steve and Joe saw an opportunity for brands to grow their reach in an entertaining way that has real added value for consumers.
Today TGA is effectively expanding the use of video games in both the B2C and B2B space. In addition to games for consumers, TGA is also playing in a number of internal corporate spaces such as sales force training, employee continuing education, and even corporate compliance. It's really this B2B area where TGA sees large, untapped potential for the use of games to engage and motivate corporate teams.
So who's using games well, with consumers and with their own employees?
"Pharma is starting to do a good job," said Steve. "The best part about building these games is that once a company has the basic functionality, then switching out content to update and refine the product is fairly easy."
With the success of pharma in the game space, it's only a matter of time before other industries catch-on.
Steve went on to say, "Financial services is an industry that could benefit tremendously from the use of gaming, on both the consumer and B2B side of the business. We've done some work with Citi and Smith-Barney, and we're hopeful that TGA will continue to expand into the industry to build games that teach consumers fiscal responsibility and train financial advisors. The possibilities are endless."
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