We’ve all seen them: Annoying banner ads and pop-ups which implore you to smack a duck in the head for a free iPod, or answer an absurdly simple question for your very own chance to become part of the latest multi-level marketing scam. While they may be dubious in their content and frustrating in their execution, these simple games take advantage of a marketing and advertising opportunity available to the internet which no other media can claim: Interaction.
For an excellent example of this, consider Pizza Hut’s partnership with Sony’s online computer game Everquest II. The game, one which demands constant vigilance from players in 7 – 10 hour spans as they run through dark and dangerous dungeons, certainly seems a ripe market for convenient, fast and deliverable food. Couple that with a hardcore gaming subculture which doesn’t traditionally stress soy milk or pilates, and advertising in-game should send players running for their telephones.
Pizza Hut, however, saw that and upped the ante – Instead of having players phone for delivery, (telephones are so 1876) they literally put the ordering feature in the game. All you do is hit the enter key as if you were going to say something, type ‘/pizza’ and a browser window automatically opens up into Pizza Hut’s online delivery system. With a few simple clicks, and even fewer once you have an account, your pizza is on its way and your character in the game is still alive and well – this sort of thing matters when dying can cost you hours of what many gamers consider to be work.
If you were killed, of course, perhaps it was not by a monster but rather by another player – and if you saw that they were in the infamous players guild “The Syndicate”, then you’d probably know that they only beat you because their guild is sponsored by Thunderbox PC, and that you only lost to them because they had such an amazing computer.
Because you, of course, are so much more skilled than they are. If only you could have a Thunderbox PC, you’d show them all. Or maybe they have a high-end nVidia video card, the kind you see exalted when you log in, and to which you can immediately click on to buy. These are the other kinds of interactive internet strategies – one where people are sold to based not on what they don’t have, but rather what someone else does, where an interaction with someone else online mostly consists of their foot interacting with your behind.
All this, of course, begs the question: What’s the advantage in the first place? To my mind, it consists of the fact that a step in the consumer process is essentially eliminated: No longer is there any delay between an impulse sparked by a marketing initiative and the decision to follow through with it. You can reach your potential clients when their want for your product is at its genesis, its sweetest moment, the instant before any kind of reconsideration begins. Interaction is the fusion of desire and chosen response, the ender of the moment between deciding that you want pizza and only then deciding from whom you will get it, or if you should in fact get it at all (does this computer game make me look fat?!) With interaction as part of your internet strategy, your product can go from one amongst many to residing at the forefront of a collective and cultural subconscious.
