Gaming Is The Most Engaging Form Of Content
Kids who play are entirely absorbed in their activity. They forget everything around them, and at that moment, they are exclusively focused on building fantastic Lego worlds, feeding and nurturing stuffed animals (or dragons), or brooding over game-changing strategic decisions. Hungarian-born Mihály Csíkszentmihályi -as a psychologist and scientist- has called this state »flow«. We become one with an activity. He applied the flow state to other challenging tasks: abilities, competencies and requirements "flow" together harmoniously in an activity, and there is no over- or under-demand. The activity is therefore motivating and emotionally positively received (this is only a very short summary, more detailed here TED.com).
What does all this have to do with COMBO! The Gaming Media Network? And who cares about the psychological concept of »flow« while busy planning campaigns and calculating KPIs? It's simple: For every second person around the globe, gaming is a regular hobby and daily entertainment media. Gamers (of all ages) are in a positive mood while playing and are absorbed in their activities – the individual flow state is just around the corner. As a result, personal attention is focused exclusively on the gameplay, and ads placed in-game are given the same attention as the gameplay itself. Ergo: the engagement rate for in-game advertising is high.
Interactive, immersive and FUN: Games have it all
The reasons for the high engagement rate are quickly explained: (mobile) gaming is, per se, an activity that stands for engagement and attention. Gaming is an emotional, immersive activity, and (good) games also succeed in telling a compelling story. In a nutshell: users stay tuned, are willing to interact with the provided content and thus actively engage with it. These aspects can be transferred to ads that are put in-game. A playable-ad format (or mini-game) combines all these aspects for more interactivity and engagement in one medium. Users perceive them as valuable, high-quality content. Havas's study 'Meaningful Brands' has shown that users expect high-quality content from companies and brands; they do not want to waste their time with uninspiring formats and irrelevant messages ('Meaningful Brands').
COMBO! The Gaming Media Network is the perfect partner for appealing gaming content and ads. After all, this network brings together game publishers and developers with extraordinary expertise and experience. They offer the most popular and successful mobile games for all ages and around the globe. Therefore, hardly anyone will know better than the COMBO! Partners how ads should be designed for a high engagement rate. Thanks to their expertise, it is possible to generate interactions with the ad and to match the context perfectly to the gaming ecosystem.
At Gameloft for brands, one parameter for a high engagement rate and effectiveness of a campaign is the number of replays of a playable ad. Many users interact with the ad the first time, possibly to get a unique advantage in the game – but then they return and play and interact with the ad because it is fun. The interaction of consumers with the brand reaches an extremely high intensity.
The possibility to interact with an ad already increases the engagement rate. At the same time, the interaction with the ad creates a strong bond between the brand and the consumers.
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