
The Digital Marketing Podcast · 2026-04-06 · 30 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
60 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
This episode tackles the structural shift in digital marketing where AI overviews, ad blockers, and platform algorithm changes are making traditional paid and organic tactics less effective and more expensive. Daniel Rowles argues that gamification - applying game psychology principles like progress mechanics, reward loops, and achievement systems to marketing experiences - offers a way to build owned engagement independent of paid clicks or search rankings. Rather than everything becoming a full game, gamification means introducing meaningful interaction and progression across email sequences, quizzes, assessments, loyalty programs, and onboarding flows. Luke from Playpark then discusses branded interactive games as a complementary strategy, sharing results from campaigns like Thirsty Camel's Australian Rules Football loyalty game, which achieved 10% participation from loyalty members, 40,000+ plays, and 12% conversion to redemption. The conversation covers practical implementation using tools like AI and no-code platforms (Manus, Canva-style builders), essential metrics (play rate, completion rate, dwell time, conversion to business objectives), and future directions like playable ads and dynamic personalization based on user data.
Rising cost-per-click, declining organic reach, and AI overviews answering searches directly mean traditional traffic sources are becoming more expensive and unreliable. Gamification builds owned engagement and repeat visits that don't depend on paid clicks or search rankings.
Thirsty Camel's Australian Rules Football loyalty game achieved 10% participation from their loyalty base, 40,000+ plays, 5-6 minute average sessions, and notably 12% of players who won in-game rewards converted to making a purchase in store.
Yes - games with real prizes show approximately 10-15x higher engagement and completion rates compared to activations without prizes, making prizes a critical component for driving play and conversion.
Track game metrics (play rate, completion rate, dwell time, repeat plays) separately from business metrics (email capture rate, conversion to sale, loyalty redemption rate, ROI) to measure both engagement quality and business impact.
Older demographics (60-80) prefer puzzle and strategy games, while younger audiences (15-30) respond better to arcade and social games; the key is matching game genre to your target demographic and business objective.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode covers legitimate strategic insights about gamification's role in countering declining organic reach and rising ad costs, but relies heavily on repeating the core concept (engagement metrics, owned attention) rather than layering novel claims throughout. The interview section with Luke becomes increasingly transactional - pricing, features, how to sign up - rather than deepening understanding. Useful but not densely packed with non-obvious ideas.
if users aren't clicking through from search, a Google has answered their question, the question becomes what experience can you offer that Google can't?
owned engagement is increasingly where the competitive advantage it lives
The core framing - gamification as a response to declining organic reach and rising CPCs - is sound but fairly standard marketing advice by 2024. The psychological principles cited (progress, reward loops, status recognition) are well-trodden. Luke's insight about playable ads and personalization in loyalty programs is slightly fresher, but the episode largely recycles familiar frameworks without contrarian or first-principles arguments that would surprise a thoughtful operator.
gamification is just about making things fun for the sake of it. It's a framework for designing experiences that keep people engaged
attention being the new currency
Luke is a co-founder of PlayPark, giving him practitioner credibility, but he is still a vendor pitching his own product throughout much of the conversation. He has real case studies (Thirsty Camel, pretzel QSR), which adds weight, but the interview functions partly as a product demo rather than an independent expert sharing hard-won operational wisdom. Useful operator perspective but somewhat limited by commercial incentive.
we've had a few come into the space to try and use it as an acquisition campaign too, as meta ads and that type of thing
they had 10% of their loyalty members played the game. They had over 40,000 game plays
Luke provides solid specifics: Thirsty Camel's 10% play rate, 40k game plays, 5 - 6 min avg session; 12% conversion to sale; pretzel QSR's 10x impression increase; PlayPark pricing ($199 for 30 days, $150/month subscription). Daniel offers certification as a case study and mentions Target Internet's own gamification efforts. However, most data is anecdotal, lacks temporal context, and no external benchmarks are cited to validate whether these results are typical or exceptional.
they had 10% of their loyalty members played the game. They had over 40,000 game plays. And they had an average of five to six minutes per session, and they had up to sort of 10 to 15 plays per user
12% of people that played the game, won a reward within the game based on an achievement, and then they went in and spent money and redeemed that in store
Daniel asks reasonable opening questions and attempts to tie gamification to the no-click environment problem, but rarely pushes back or probe deeper. He takes Luke's claims largely at face value (e.g., "that's fascinating") and doesn't challenge assumptions about ROI, attribution, or scalability. The conversation flows smoothly but reads more like a guided product tour than a rigorous exploration; missed opportunities to ask harder questions about user fatigue, repeat engagement decay, or how gamification performs in B2B contexts.
I mean it's particularly interesting. One of the things we've been talking about in the podcast a lot recently is this no click environment
I think it's fascinating 'cause we, you know, we are a B2B organization
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
What happens when clicks get harder to earn, paid media gets more expensive, and audiences spend less time engaging with static content? In this episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, Daniel Rowles explores why gamification is moving from a nice-to-have tactic to a serious strategic opportunity for marketers. This episode is split into two parts. First, Daniel sets out the business case for gamification in today's digital landscape, where AI overviews, rising cost per click and declining organic reach are all putting pressure on traditional marketing performance. Then he is joined by Luke Santamaria from PlaySpark, a specialist in branded interactive games, to look at how brands are using mini-games, playable ads and reward mechanics to build attention, loyalty and conversion.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker: Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Target internet com. My name's Daniel Roll, and in this episode we're talking about gamification for digital marketing.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is gonna be a podcast of two halves. So first of all, I have some of the latest insights and stats of why gamification is probably more important than ever in digital marketing. And we'll look at a load of different gamification techniques. And then next we're gonna move an interview. Where we look at the other side of this, actually using games for gamification since about 30% of the world's population actually play digital games of some description. And I'm gonna be joined by Luke from Playpark who specializes in branded interactive games. So let's start by talking about a problem most of us are kind of sitting with right now, even if we haven't really named it directly. You're creating content. You are running paid campaigns, you are posting consistently on social, and generally we're seeing the returns getting harder and harder to justify. Click through rates are down. Cost per click is up in some sectors dramatically. So, and then there's the issue that's been quietly reshaping search marketing for the last couple of years a I views in Google. So users ask a question, Google answers it right there on the page and you're carefully optimized. Article never actually gets the click and the traffic was flowing through to our websites is increasingly not even arriving. This isn't gonna be a temporary blip. It's a real structural shift in how we're consuming information online and it's really compressing return on investment. Most established tactics in digital marketing playbook are really giving us, so what's been the reaction to this? Well, we could keep bidding, hiring paid search, and hope the economics kind of work out. We can keep chasing organic rankings, uh, and accept that a growing proportion of our searchers never actually reach our site. Or we can start thinking a bit differently about what digital marketing is actually for. And that's where gamification, it's not just relevant, but it's maybe strategically important. So the key insight is that gamification is just about making things fun for the sake of it. It's a framework for designing experiences that keep people engaged. They give them a reason to come back, and that build a relationship between your brand and your audience. That doesn't depend on a paid click or a Google ranking. And maybe we should been in doing this for a long time, so. If we're in an environment where rented attention 'cause attention, we're buying or borrowing from platforms is becoming more expensive, less reliable owned engagement is increasingly where the competitive advantage it lives. So. We could also look at email marketing being connected to this in that we own that email list. We decide what goes into it. We can drive the level of engagement based on our content, and I think gamification of our content lies in this place as well. So let's try and be a bit more precise about what we actually mean in a marketing context. 'cause it can be misunderstood. It doesn't mean that everything needs to be a game, although. We'll see there is a place that later on, but it means applying the psychological principles that make games compelling to our marketing experiences. So things like progress mechanics, reward loops, challenge and achievement, social competitions, status recognition. There're all different mechanisms that can make people stay return and invest emotionally into an experience. And they work because they tap into deep human motivations. The desire to improve, to be recognized, to belong to a group, to complete things. So this is how this kind of maps onto the problems that you just described. 'cause if users aren't clicking through from search, a Google has answered their question, the question becomes what experience can you offer that Google can't? An AI overview can summarize information. It can't provide a personalized challenge, a progress tracker, a quiz that adapts to someone's specific situation or a community where people share their results. Those kind of experiences live maybe on our platforms, and they require a visit, and if they're well designed, they incentivize repeat visits as well. So loyalty programs are probably the most established example of gamification in marketing, and they exist precisely because of this kind of logic. But the principle extends beyond points and reward cards, although. I love a loyalty program. Uh, if anyone from Bonvoy is listening, I am an absolute bonvoy fanatic in terms of their loyalty program. And they've got huge levels of gamification, but there's a clear reward. I build my point and I'm basically getting free hotel nights so I can really easily connect my effort to what that outcome is. But it doesn't always have to be like that. So we can apply this to interactive content. So we've got assessments, calculators, quizzes, diagnostic tools. You've got community features, leaderboards challenges, peer recognition onboarding flows, email sequences with unlockable, content learning programs with progression structures. You have to do this before you get this. Once you do this, you achieve this. So any touch point where you can introduce some sort of meaningful interaction, progress and reward. Is a candidate for gamification thinking. So we have a learning platform. We clearly then have certification. If you complete this learning, you get a certification, and that is an accredited certification from ourselves or the chartered industry of marketing. But that, that's a form of gamification that we're all familiar with on a day by day basis. Now, if we connect this back to our paid media problems, because it's directly relevant, your average cost per click is rising. Across a lot of sectors, we're seeing cost per clicks increase year on year as competition goes up, but also because of AI targeted campaigns. We've mentioned previously that AI targeted campaigns like Performance Max seem to do a lot of retargeting going after people that have maybe clicked before. So your return on advertising spend is potentially going down. And therefore the pressure on conversion rate is going up. You're paying more to get someone to your site, so you need more of them to do something valuable when they arrive. Gamified experiences consistently outperform static pages on engagement metrics, whether that's time on site, pages visited, return visits, or ultimately conversion. So if we can use that paid search traffic or organic traffic, even if we're getting less of it and it's more expensive or harder to get two, a well-designed, interactive experience that helps maybe a user understand their situation and presents it with a relevant next step that will outperform a brochure page in almost every measurable way. So on social media, organic reach has been declining steadily, and paid amplification is becoming the norm. Even for content that used to earn free distribution, gamification potentially offers something valuable. So shareability and participation. So a quiz, people can share their score from a challenge. They can invite colleagues to compete and compare their scores. A poll that sparks a real strong conversation. We see newspapers doing this all the time in the online editions. These kind of formats generate the kind of active engagement that platforms reward with distribution rather than passive scroll past that increasingly defines how people experience that branded content. Now the other thing I'd say here is that we've spoken about this previously, and we'll speak about it more in some future episodes, but the ability to vibe, code, to create interactive content using our AI platforms, whether it's chat, bt, Gemini, or anything else, has become massively easier. And actually platforms like Manus allow us to create interactive games that save scores, create leaderboards, it does all the backend for us and so on. And we can do that really easy now. So the barrier to this gamified interactive content has got a lot lower. There's also a longer term strategic case that's worth making as well. Brands that are going to be the most resilient in the current environment. Are the ones building their own assets, communities, databases of emails or customers habitual relationships to their audience. Gamification is one of the most effective tools for building those relationships. When someone earns a badge, completes a challenge, reaches a milestone, your program, or achieves a score, they want to improve. They've invested something in, and that investment creates a reason to return. That doesn't depend on you paying for attention each time. Now this isn't a theoretical kind of future possibility. It's already being done effectively across lots of business to consumer and business brands. Marketing skills platforms use progress mechanics to keep learners engaged. So we do this on target internet SAS products. So use onboarding gamifications to drive feature adoption, showing percentage complete. We saw this on LinkedIn. How much of your profile is complete? Retail brands use challenge mechanics in their apps to sustain purchase behavior. Things like, if you spend this much more, then get this stuff free. If you spend twice more in the month, you become this type of member and get this for free. These kind of techniques are mature. The case studies exist and the tools to implement them are way more accessible than they've ever been because of the ability to vibe code. So to bring this together before we move into the conversation that follows. The external environment for digital marketing is more challenging than it was five years ago. The channels that used to deliver reliable cost-effective traffic are becoming noisier and more expensive and Passive content. Content that people just scroll past is losing ground to experiences that actively involve people. We've been speaking about community for a while and that's why it's the case. Gamification should be a systematic approach to building these experiences. 'cause it's grounded in how people actually behave, not how we'd like them to behave. And an era where every click is harder to earn. Building experiences worth coming back to is one of the most commercially sound investments a marketing team can make. And actually using some of these vibe coding techniques, we've got the ability to build and to update on an ongoing basis. So we've got these kind of techniques we could use, but what about the actual games side of gamification? Almost a third of the world's population play games of some description, whether that's on a computer in Xbox or casual gaming on an app, uh, on there, if I'm gonna be joined by Luke from Play, spark, a company that specializes in these branded games and we've got a target internet example that they've very kindly created for us. So get over to target internet.com/podcast. Or go to Target internet on LinkedIn and you'll see our Sky Stackers game. And you might have played one of these sky stacker games before, but. Go in, play it to your heart's content, make sure you've logged in to do that to members, your score. And we have got a year's free membership, of target internet up for grabs. If you're an existing member, we'll extend your membership by year for free. And we have got five bundles of target internet merchandise, for joining in that we will give away as well. So check that out. Target internet on LinkedIn, so just before we go to the interview, for me, this is a real call to arms. It's much easier to create interactive content now. And you've seen a few examples on Target internet, where we've done persona builders. We've gone through and quite user journey map creators. If you haven't checked 'em out on the Target internet website. But how could we go beyond that? How could we do something that gamifies and brings you back again and again and prides real value? And I think there's so many opportunities in this space at the moment that there's a real first lead advantage as well. So think about how you're gonna use Google Gemini, or you're gonna use chatt, bt, or in fact Claude, to create some of these things. And let us know what you've created, uh, and we will share those as well. So target internet.com/podcast. Send us what you've built, uh, and we will share that. And with that, over to the interview. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: I'm here with Luke, so let's get straight into it Luke. So what inspired you to start play Spark, and what kind of problem are you trying to solve for brands and marketers? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Yeah, so thanks for having me on Daniel. We know that 30% of the world's population actually play a game. So I saw there was a, a gap in the market where, you know, you come across ads these days, people are putting more ad blockers on. I think 67% of the world actually have an ad blocker on their system. So. We just started to notice there was a trend where people are blocking ads, they're scrolling through, and it was just making it harder for brands, not only to acquire new users with advertising, but to actually engage them and retain them, uh, with loyalty. So yeah, so that's what we build place, spark for. We basically wanted to take what was traditionally a passive advertising ecosystem and turn it into an interactive one. So instead of being a passive viewer of an experience or an ad, we're actually taking that and making you interact with that brand. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: So do you think that's the main reason that brands are kinda shifting from those traditional ad experiences to more interactive experiences then, and the kind of playable ads and mini games and things. riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Yeah. So a lot of people talk about, you know, attention being the new currency, which is, which is quite true. So if you look at a traditional ad, it might take your attention for one or two seconds. But when you talk about an interactive game, like we're seeing average playtime's up to three or four minutes with games, so. To extrapolate that out, to capturing someone's attention and being actively involved in your brand. It's quite powerful. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: Yeah, I mean it's particularly interesting. One of the things we've been talking about in the podcast a lot recently is this no click environment. So the idea that you're searching in Google but you're not clicking now. 'cause the AI overviews, you're going to social media, you're engaging with content maybe, but you're still not clicking. So that brand exposure and brand interaction obviously becomes, comes really important. I mean, what kinda results are you seeing from brands? In terms of engagement or conversions or, I mean even maybe return on investment. How'd you kind of look at that? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Yeah, so it's been really interesting. The great thing about games is because they're just a, you know, they work as an advertising channel or an engagement channel. They can be used across any brand in any industry. So we've seen the likes of retailers across, you know, quick service restaurants all the way through to FMCG, food and beverage brands use. Either we'd split it into two parts. So you can either use mini games, which are branded for loyalty. So in that instance, we did a campaign with a alcohol retailer called Thirsty Camel down here in Australia. And what they did is they ran a game which was branded and themed to Australian rules football. And they gated that. So that was part of their loyalty system. So when you logged into your loyalty account, you actually created an account for you in the game. Then you went and flicked a footy. It was a 3D type game. You flick a footy at Cairns, which had their supply brands as the Cairns. We had really good results with them. So their goal for that was to engage their loyalty members outside a transaction. So they're all about, okay, people spend with us, but how do we actually engage a in between transaction? So outta that, they had 10% of their loyalty members played the game. They had over 40,000 game plays. And they had an average of five to six minutes per session, and they had up to sort of 10 to 15 plays per user. So it was pretty crazy in how they did that. But the big one for them was, it wasn't just the engagement, it was the conversion to sale. You know, when we talk about ad units for games, the great thing about them is you can use them for acquisition, you can use 'em for data capture, but it's actually a full funnel channel where you can funnel them all the way through to sale. They had 12% of people that played the game, won a reward within the game based on an achievement, and then they went in and spent money and redeemed that in store. So from an engagement and a business objective perspective, it was a really good outcome for them. And that's where we see a lot of brands at the moment using games, is in loyalty. We've had a few come into the space to try and use it as an acquisition campaign too, as meta ads and that type of thing. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: So they're really interested then, because you're talking about real world incentives here then, and we were speaking just before we connect stuff about prizes and those kind of things. Is that normally a kind of key part of this, or does it work without that as well? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Yeah, so we've done activations without prizes and with prizes. There is quite a big difference when you have a prize as opposed to a non prize activation. So you're talking, you know, with a prize it's probably 10 to 15 times more engagement in terms of converting to watch or play. And it's a similar metric to actually go through that whole cycle and finish that game. So prizes are quite important. So we like to think of games as like a supercharged promotion, yeah. So it is important. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: I think it's fascinating 'cause we, you know, we are a B2B organization and actually we found that with our merchandise, so we have these mugs and we did these kind of limited edition mugs and different, you know, different designs for each one. And they're massive mugs. riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Yep. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: were super keen on them and it became a real thing. Like we'd go on, we'd have our sessions live and people would be sitting there drinking for the mugs and, oh, you've got that one, I've got this one. And actually it can work even in those kind of circumstances as well. So what's the kind of future of this for you at the moment? I mean, obviously you built Playbar. How do you see this kind of evolving over time? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: So there's two things we're sort of moving into. So a lot of us, our work has been in mini gains for loyalty. And that's still scaling out. But the other thing we're noticing that's working for brands is what's called playable ads. So these are 10 to 15 second versions of games, which you use as an ad in either Meta or, you know, Google Display Network or they're predominantly used in mobile gaming. So if you've ever played a game like Candy Crush, you might be shown a short playable out of a brand. The great thing about those is that you have to play that game and you're immersed in that brand. You can't turn away because you're part of that experience. So there's Blas and then there's also personalization. So what we're starting to see is that with loyalty programs that embed our games in. We can, the way that our system works is it works on parameters so you can change all the elements of the game. But what we're looking to do is if we've got a data set of a group of users in a loyalty program and one user goes into play a game, if we've got certain data sets of that user, we can dynamically change that game to show that user what they're interested in. So let's say. It's a retailer game. They like Nike shoes. We can actually change the assets of the game to show those products within the game dynamically. And we can also change the reward system to dynamically show those rewards to that user. So that's where we see it heading at the moment, is it's heavy on personalization. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: okay, so let's get into the practicalities for our kind of audience. So, so what are some practical ways that they can add interactive to their campaigns without actually necessarily building a full game? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: So it, it's funny, so with a lot of brands, gaming and mini games is quite new, so it's hard to wrap their heads around it. That's the most simplest thing to get started with. An is. Understanding what are you trying to achieve, and then map that game to that business objective. But usually it's something as simple as a trivia game or a spin to win game, which you can go in and brand and whip up pretty quickly. So with play Spark, essentially it's like Canva. You can go and create your own game. Change the elements and you can essentially get your game within 10 minutes. So for brands going into this space, it's just about, okay, what are my objectives? Is it user acquisition? Is it, you know, who's my user base as well? Who's gonna play this type of game? 'cause there's different genres of games, which will target different age demographics and groups. So if you are targeting 60 to 80 year olds, they're more into puzzle games, strategy, that type of thing. But if you're targeting. 15 or 30 year olds, they're more about arcade and social and those types of things. So it's thinking about those types of things. But I think to get started, it's just keeping it simple and making it simple for the user and what their experience is. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: All right, so if you're running ad campaigns of interactive elements, what are the metrics we should be measuring? How are we gonna look at this from a kind of success point of view? 'cause I know it's not gonna purely be about the impressions or the clicks. riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Exactly right. So when we work with brands, we like to split it into two categories. So it's about what are game metrics and what are the business objectives and what are the metrics to measure them. So common metrics you would wanna look at with a mini game. Let's say it's for loyalty, you wanna look at, okay, if I'm sending an email out to my database. What is that conversion rate? Someone to click to open that game. Then from there, we're looking at game metrics. So looking at play rate. How many people that open that game are actually going and playing that game. Then completion rate, we're looking at how many complete it. So we're looking at how interactive and how engaging is this game. And then dwell time takes into that as well. How long do they spend playing? Do they come back and play? So they're sort of the game metrics that you wanna look at. And then when you look at business objectives, it's all about, okay, well. If I'm using this game to try and acquire leads, let's say data caption, you've got an email capture form. At the end of the game, you're looking at, okay, how, what percentage of the users that played actually went and, you know, filled in that form and got that email. Or alternatively, it might be I want to drive e-comm sales. How many people actually went, played the game, went to my e-com store and redeemed the coupon that they won in the game? So yeah, we always talk about, split it into business objectives and game objectives. Then you can just track that full funnel all the way through. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: So I'm quite interested, 'cause I love you described it as like a canvas style. You can go and design your own kind of approach to things and you've got that kind of speed to testing this out. So what about if someone's got an existing campaign and wants to add some sort of activation to it, what would you be your approach to that? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: I think the thing with games is you can either add it as a compliment to your existing campaign or you can change the creative. So let's just say you've got an ad on Facebook or meta and you want to drive traffic to your website. You can essentially go in, create, duplicate the same campaign, and instead of the image or video is the creative. You take a URL of one of our games or another. Company that you might use, and you essentially add that as the creative. And then what you're trying to do is you're changing the ad copy to be about play to win rather than, you know, go to our store or visit our site. So it's pretty simple. You're just changing the creative and slightly changing the ad copy. But the power in what it does for your metrics is quite large. So we recently done a campaign with a a quick service restaurant down here who sell pretzels. And they had a 10 times increase in the impressions in their meta ads going from one, same, one promotion and just simply changing it to a game instead of a simple image. And that had enormous impacts on how much conversions they had to install sales. So there's different ways you can go about it but there are a couple of examples of how people can go about it. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: Let's talk about that a bit more then, because look, kinda what are the key creative principles then the, like a mini game or an interactive actually makes it memorable. What's gonna make it work from a creative perspective? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: The best way to approach games is to make them simple to understand, simple to play. So when someone first interacts with a game, you want to them to understand what to do. So within two seconds, they can play. They want to, you wanna make it easy for 'em. But if you want them to play longer, you eventually want to make that game harder to master the longer that they play. It does come down to what your objective is. So if your objective is trying to get them to visit a website or get their email, you wanna make that interaction as fun and as quick as possible. But if you're using it for loyalty, it's all about, okay. I wanna make this creative last a little bit longer, so I'm gonna make that game a little bit more interactive, a little bit harder and keep people engaged for a longer time. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: I should say to people as well, if you wanna see some examples of this. And we've actually built out a kind of target internet one as well. If you go to target internet.com/podcast, you'll see a load of examples there in the show notes. Obviously we've linked through to the website there, so you can play around with this as well. But. What about brand story? Because a lot of, if this is gonna be about brand reinforcement, so you've got the kind of direct conversion. But what about trying to tell a brand story and tie that kind of into that quite short game experience? How'd you go about doing that? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: I think the low hanging fruit there is simply just changing the game to fit the assets that you are trying to achieve. So say you're. If you've got a Flappy Bird type game, which is one of our templates, you go in and you're, let's say you're a coffee brand. You might create a coffee bean with wings type animation, going through rings and flying and collecting coffee cups, that type of thing. Then you can start to build your logos in your branding into the back of the background so you can start to theme it and brand it so people start to feel like it's a coffee based game. So that's probably number one. The other things we do with our games is we sort of interlink and embed marketing into the game. So we have things like if you reach level one, you'll have a level one popup saying, well done. You could plug your brand story into that. So you have a popup and say, well done. You know, did you know you know, X coffee brand was, is 40 years old? That type of thing. See, starts to brand your story. The other cool thing we do is in gaming, there's this thing called rewarded interactions. So you might play a game, lose a life, you wanna get your score back and keep going. You can actually interact with these rewarded marketing pieces. So with Play Spark, you can plug in rewarded video or surveys or those types of thing. If I wanna go back with my old score, I could watch a quick 30, 15 second video, get my reward and go back. So with those videos, you can start to embed those key story messages about your brand. Which is pretty cool. And people immersed in those rewarded activities because they know there's a reward on the end of it to get back into that game. So it's a pretty pretty good loop of how to keep people engaged. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: And then once you built something like this, can you use it beyond a single campaign? What's the kind of life cycle of this? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Let's say you want to create one game, you could use that game in multiple parts of your business. So depending on what type of business you are, you have, depends on where you can distribute it. So, for instance, we've got one client that created one game. They used it as a playable ad to drive people to their website. They had the same game on the counter of the in-store venue to scan and play, and it had a slight different reward attached to it. But then they also had in some of their venues a kiosk. So some venues might have a kiosk where you can touch screen and order your food. They had the game on the actual kiosk, so you could play the game on the kiosk and off you go. That's an example of just using one game in different situations. Or you could take one game, duplicate it in our system. Slightly rebrand at Change awards slightly, you know, touch it up a little bit. So you might create the same game across summer and have a summer type theme. And let's say Easter rolls around, you might create the same game with an Easter feel, so you could repurpose it and use it for the same objective or different objectives. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: Okay, so we've kind of got the theory. If marketers now wanna go off and experiment with this and they wanna try and look at gamified content, you know, in the next month what the steps they're gonna take, how are they gonna get into it? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: So there's some easy ways and some hard ways. So traditionally what a brand might do is go to an agency and say, Hey, can you build me a game? You might be flipped a bill of 40 or $50,000 to do that. It might take you four or five months for them to build it out for you. And that's one of the reasons we built Playbar is it's just, it's often too expensive and lengthy to do that, especially it's an experimental advertising channel for most. So you could go into someone like Playbar or there are other companies that do things similar to us. With Playbar you can go in, create an account for free, you can get a template of a game, and then you can go and create that brand it and add your marketing rewards in it. And essentially you could spit that out within 30 minutes. And start sharing it. So the way that these are shared normally is as a URL. So you could send it as an email campaign with a URL people click and play or you can embed it in your website or your app. So there's various ways you can do it. But generally the no code game creation way is starting to take off. So especially for brands who are cost conscious and want to just test it out. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: Well, let's talk about play Spot, specifically from a kind of cost point of view. So how do you charge? Is it based on the game you create? Is it based on usage? What's the approach? riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: So we, we are quite flexible with our pricing and if you go to our website, you'll see it's pretty transparent. So there's two options. So if you wanna dip your toe on the water and then have a go you can go in and create a game from scratch. You can test it out, you can do that, all that for free. Then when you wanna launch it and you wanna share that you essentially just pay a single fix fee for 30 days and off you go. So you could do that for as little as $199 for that 30 days. Then if you find it works for your business and you're like, okay, well I wanna roll this game out across, you know, my ads and my in, in-store and e-commerce and in my app then you can go to a subscription and you can start to pay for as. We do it for as little as 150 a month, you can have as many campaigns per month as you want. So yeah, pretty simple to go and do these days especially with how we've run it. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: No, I love it. 'cause I think always the barrier it is experimental for people, they're not sure if this is gonna work. They're not sure, what this is gonna kind of feel like for their customers and actually this ability to go and just try it out, get something out their launch app. But you know, a pretty, pretty low cost is phenomenal as well. Right? So how can people get in contact? Tell us about our best way to reach out and kind of. riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: So the two easiest ways are LinkedIn. If you look at myself, Luke San Maria, I'm pretty active there. All my email is luke@placemark.co. riverside_daniel_rowles_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0196: Perfect. We'll put it all in the show notes, target internet.com/podcast. We'll put a link through to that example game. And we'll get a link through to all Luke's details as well. So Luke, thank you so much for joining us and kind of introducing us this gamification approach and we'll be very interested to how the listeners' going with it. riverside_luke_raw-audio_digital_marketing p_0197: Thanks Daniel. Appreciate it.
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