Three Ways Gaming Can Revolutionize the Car Purchase Funnel
Three Ways Gaming Can Revolutionize the Car Purchase Funnel
After a hard, global break caused by the COVID-19 crisis, the automotive industry is now roaring back to life with impressive levels of production and readiness marking the first quarter of 2021 across the world.* Like everywhere else, however, the automotive industry is not quite “back to normal” and may never be again, as it faces significant opportunity—and demand—for change. How can the industry take advantage of these shifts to revolutionize its advertising?
The truth is that even though many aspects of the automotive industry have changed drastically in the last several decades (such as its designs, technologies, and services), the revolution didn’t quite happen for the purchase process. The process by which a customer discovers, considers, tests, purchases, and maintains a car has remained largely unchanged from the way it has always been.
The problem with this is that the consumers who are purchasing those cars are not the same as they’ve always been. Customers expect more than ever from brands, all of which face stiff competition for loyalty. What your customers want is engaging, quality content that brings them value, entertainment, and immediate fulfilment for their valuable time. So what’s the best way to offer all of that, and more, to an eager and waiting audience?
The answer is gaming, and especially mobile gaming. Gaming is the best way to capture a consumer’s undivided attention in a fully engaging and, with Gameloft, brand-optimal environment. You can use the principles and mechanics that make video games so fun for your audience to offer seamless advertising in a way that consumers will find fun and exciting, thanks to a process called gamification. In this category, the three best ways to generate better conversions for your business are native integrations, interactive content, and esports.
Native Integration
Seamlessly integrated advertising, done so well the audience genuinely does not realize they are being advertised to. Of course that sounds far too good to be true, but that’s what makes in-game ads so potentially incredible. Take Asphalt 9: Legends, for example, the most recent addition to Gameloft’s flagship series, and also the game that achieved the one billionth download for its series. The game allows players to choose, customize, and drive a wide variety of real-world cars as a part of regular play. Gamers love to drive the cars they play in their favourite video games, and this is not a statistic that is limited to the Ferraris and Porsches of the world. According to a recent survey, 47% of Asphalt 9 players in the United States are planning to buy a new car within the next twelve months, and every single one of them is being exposed, on a regular basis, to models, styles, and ideas as they play through the series. Best of all, they’re having fun with it, and love that at every stage of the purchasing funnel, including post-purchase, they can experience to some degree what it’s like to have that car for themselves. By the time they reach your store, they’ve already fallen in love with a model that you already have.
Interactive Content & Gamification
Gamification in marketing means using mechanics and features commonly used in games to engage the audience with a brand. The process of gamification can take many forms, within-game advertising and gamified experiences being among the most common. To click on a YouTube preroll ad and reach a landing page for the exact car you were just looking at is predictable—it’s been done. What if instead the page you’re taken to allows you to fully customize a vehicle of your choosing to best suit your needs… and then gives you the option to buy it then and there?
This is the kind of solution that Gameloft is proposing using gamification to boost the automotive sales of our partners. 71% of respondents to the company’s US survey agreed that an ad “that lets me configure a car’s colour, interior and other features would likely make me more interested in the model.” In practice, this means giving the audience full ownership of the ad itself on a mini-site, using features like 360º viewing, customizations for colours and configurations, and video/gallery integrations to let the viewer decide for themselves exactly what it is they want—and to have fun while they’re at it. Games, after all, are supposed to be about having fun, so it should come as no surprise that gamification seeks to carry those ideas into your advertising.
eSports & Special Operations
Advertising during sports competitions is already common enough, but esports can take it to the next level. This year, for example, a thrilling competition happened on Asphalt 9: Legends, The Asphalt Series 2021 Team Edition. During three months players could qualify through several in-game sponsored events, available on IOS Google Play and Windows. The online finals happened had more than 62k views. eSports and special operations give Gameloft’s partners the ability to integrate your brand as a part of a relevant prize pool for the competition, for example, and use the accessibility of the game itself to attract impressions. Games like the Asphalt series allow for advertising to tournament competitors just as much as to its audience—they’re the ones driving the cars! In 2020 alone, Asphalt competitions attracted nearly four million unique participants and earned over fifty-five million impressions. The accessibility of video gaming makes esports a phenomenal opportunity for highly targeted marketing, with every participant enjoying themselves along the way. The thrill of victory becomes a part of the marketing strategy.
It’s hard to overstate the power of the gamified experience. For the automotive industry, where the process of buying a new car often feels stagnated, gamification and in-game ads are a breath of fresh air, and a way to bring in genuine excitement to the processes of discovery, consideration, and post-purchase. Gameloft has successfully leveraged gamification for a number of well-known automotive brands, with every campaign representing a new opportunity to explore creative and genuinely exciting roads to success.
If you’d like to learn more about how gamification can leverage your engagement rates,
