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?
