How Gaming Will Combat Ad Immunity

 About two weeks ago I was exposed to an interesting presentation at the Design - Innovate - Communicate - Entertain conference that discussed how gaming has integrated with reality. "Design Outside the Box" is a lecture by Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell that explores how gaming, in the broadest sense of the word, has become an essential part to influencing behavior in the real world.

While I believe that the last few minutes of his lecture describe a future that I will not live to see, I think that the general theme of his argument, that games are going from influencing and evaluating in-game behaviors to real-world behaviors, is something that is on the cusp of going mainstream. He describes a car company that put what essentially amounted to a gigapet in your dashboard. When you drove appropriately, consequently saving gas, it would grow and provide immediate positive reinforcement for the sake of a desired behavior: consuming less gas.

The most relevant point to this post was Schell's reference to online advertisements and how gaming has a positive impact on their efficacy. "That's how it works," he said, "the games trick you into paying more attention to the ads."

As someone who grew up with the internet, I kind of wrote this off initially. While I had heard of the 40+ crowd doing their shopping through Google Adsense or banner advertisements, I sincerely doubted anyone around my age clicking on an advertisement for a Playstation 3 and purchasing it right there and then. A recent case study funded by Yahoo seems to back this claim, suggesting that younger people have a well developed immunity to online advertisements.

The research, conducted in partnership with an undisclosed national retailer, sought to accurately measure the impact of Internet display advertising across online and offline sales, by tracking people who had registered with both Yahoo and the store. The research found an approximately 5 percent increase in spending among those who had seen the ads–with 93 percent of those sales occurring in stores.

The potentially worrisome thing, however, was that among those under 40, the percentage was nearly zero. That could reflect the unpopularity of the particular retailer among that demographic. Or it could underscore a growing immunity to display advertising among the Web-savvy younger generation.

While there are certainly some confounding variables at work here, I seem to recall more and more articles cropping up about advertisement immunity, and the question any online media manager should be asking themselves is this: how do we combat advertisement immunity in a non-intrusive way?


Let's understand that more and more people are flocking to streaming sites like Hulu for minimum advertising interference. Some people download episodes off of websites like Amazon or pick up there favorite shows on DVD through Net Flix. The younger a person is, the less tolerance they have for advertisements.

And so after thinking about Schell's argument, I started becoming more aware of time sensitive interactive advertisements. I'm not referring to just interactive banners; I'm talking about interactive video advertisements such as the one found on Live Stream. If you click on that URL and wait about 40 seconds, you should get an Axe commercial that is not only time sensitive and encourages you to pay attention to the advertisement, but rewards you with positive reinforcement if you answer correctly.

 

This is on the cusp of what online advertising could eventually become, but I think we could take it one step further. What if users were tracked by their IP address/cookies, and every time they successfully completed one of these advertisements, they accrued points towards discounts, cash back rewards, or even convert their points into real world donations to various non-profits of their choice? What if there was a way of gaining "achievements," information entailing how many advertisements you successfully answered, whether or not you remembered a slogan correctly (Got Milk?), or were better at completing ads from Konika vs. Kodak?

In my undergraduate studies, I felt as if just about every challenge I encountered was a game. There were defined rules, and not everyone played by them, but there were attempts at achieving consistency and establishing parameters. There were objectives, milestones, and occasionally moments of positive feedback.

By integrating interactive online advertisements (engagement) with immediate positive reinforcement (psychology), an agency could theoretically develop a business around empowering younger users while simultaneously influencing consumer behavior. One could easily synthesize ideas such as Free Rice and not only inform internet users about a new product or brand, but also empower users and bring about some good in the world.

At least that's what the idealist in me says. I think online advertising is the future - soon we'll watch television, listen to music, and read newspapers primarily online - but thinking of online advertising in terms of how advertisements currently function in traditional mediums will leave future generations disinterested and with a greater advertisement immunity.