Get Smart with your Brand

Posted on: Friday 02 July 2010 9:02am

Which gaming platform is right for your brand and how can you use games and apps to make money?

Moderator: Jamie Cason, MD, Avril Digital

Speakers

Dan Efergan, Creative Director of Digital , Aardman Animations

Jamie MacDonald, Senior Vice President, Codemasters Studios

Maurice Suckling, Co-founder, The Mustard Corporation

James Whitmarsh, Mobile Product Manager , Turner EMEA

Cinema 2 was all soft lighting, soft edges and stippling on the ceiling – a kind space for first thing on the morning after the night before (yes, you’ve caught us out – these blogs aren’t exactly being uploaded in the right order…)

Jamie Cason was equally kind and without a spot of stippling.But he wasn’t going to let everyone slumber in the back row… he renamed the event Play Your Brands Right and invited people to heckle, come on down – at least in a virtual sense – with tweets and old fashioned hand raising.

The bulk of the session was given over to the panellists giving an overview of the games industry – useful for a luddite like me but the event really came alive when the audience stopped surreptitiously emailing and looking at Facebook (be ashamed) took its new found understanding of the games industry landscape (point of interest: PS2 added 7.5 million installed bases last year – see how quickly I pick up the language!) to not have ‘brain storms’ or ‘mind showers’ but “plonks from our brains” to generate some ‘gamey’ product (I may now be making up my own jargon.It has nothing to do with meat that’s been hung too long, even though that’s how some of us looked this morning).

Tweets and shouts suggested a number of brands that could be given some kind of game life.We were given four questions with which to interrogate a brand:What’s the brand’s promise?Who are the players?What is the platform? What is the product?

The panel were outstanding: reacting incredibly quickly and using input from the proposer to fire out suggestions using the four questions.For example: Genie In The House –

Promise? Comedy, mayhem and something else.

Players? Predominantly Germany and Europe kids age 8-12.

Platform?DS, i-phone and 3DS.

Product?Rub a lamp to make a wish and the genie pops up and does something utterly stupid and fun.And… and…. and….. it’s a 3D genie!

There were reasons for these decisions to do with the platforms the audience are using and what lies at the core of the brand.These guys are good.They were equally as inventive with The Little Red Train preschool books and when it came time to vote, the show of hands – no tweeted votes – was pretty much equal for each.Prizes were given to the two proposers and the audience left less jaded and jowly, but ‘gamey’ – in a good way – and suitably inspired.