Tag: gamification

With the motto “unlocking what’s next” in marketing, The Next Practice, a global marketing communications company, recently collaborated with Ant International to demonstrate how sustainability marketing can become integral to activating a brand’s purpose.

In an exclusive interview with MARKETECH APAC, The Next Practice shared insights into this collaboration. During the Singapore Fintech Festival 2024, Ant International showcased its commitment to sustainability and digital innovation through an immersive augmented reality (AR) activation focused on eco-tourism and MSME support. This initiative not only emphasised sustainability but also highlighted its importance as a driver of long-term economic and social value. 

“Sustainable tourism holds immense potential to serve as a catalyst for environmental conservation, social progress, and economic development. Through this AR interactive travel experience, we aim to showcase how eco-tourism, supported by digital solutions and financing, can create local jobs, preserve cultural heritage, and protect natural ecosystems. By merging digital technology with purpose, we’re inspiring a new wave of travel that contributes to shared prosperity and sustainability,” said Carrie Suen, vice president and global head of international affairs and sustainability strategies at Ant International.

When discussing sustainability in the marketing context, many brands mistakenly confine it to corporate responsibility initiatives, ESG reporting, and short-term campaigns. Traditionally, marketing has been a powerful tool for driving commercial growth by influencing consumer behaviour. With increasing awareness of sustainability, sustainability marketing has emerged as a new driver for fostering conscious consumption that rewards purpose-driven companies. True sustainability involves embedding sustainable practices into a company’s business model, ensuring that the business, stakeholders, and customers thrive together in perpetuity.

Sustainability marketing: Turning awareness into action

Bev Ho, head of sustainability marketing at The Next Practice, explained the transformative power of immersive experiences through gamification in creating impactful sustainability campaigns. “Gamified elements turned passive awareness into active participation, enabling participants to connect their actions—like supporting social development and environmental projects—with tangible impacts on sustainability,” she said.

In this activation, Ant International invited participants to immerse themselves in an AR experience by selecting avatars and exploring Sumbawa, Indonesia. Activities such as whale shark conservation and visiting local bee farms allowed participants to see firsthand how sustainable practices create positive change. These engaging, hands-on experiences underscored the importance of integrating sustainability into daily actions and highlighted the critical role of community-driven efforts in fostering long-term environmental and social progress.

Uplifting smaller communities

Sustainability is not only about environmental conservation; it is also about empowering smaller communities to drive social and economic development. Ant International’s activation highlighted the vital role MSMEs play in fostering sustainable development.

“According to data from the United Nations, MSMEs represent 90% of businesses, 60 to 70% of employment and 50% of GDP worldwide. They are local heroes that can drive social, economic, and sustainable progress. By enabling game participants to support and empower MSMEs with solutions such as digital payments and green financing for renewable energy, everyday consumers can understand how they can contribute to greater sustainable development in small but meaningful ways. The immersive experience is more than just a game—it’s a way for people to realise that their choices can lead to real change,” Carrie explained.

Addressing the gap through technology

One of the most significant challenges brands face is bridging the gap between sustainability awareness and motivating real-world action. Ant’s AR experience tackled this issue by leveraging technology to create immersive, interactive experiences that allowed participants to visualise potential real-life impacts.

Bev added, “The gamification approach makes abstract sustainability concepts tangible, motivating participants to take actionable steps through relatable examples and real-time engagement. The use of ‘phygital’ – a combination of physical and digital – engagement transformed complex sustainability concepts into potential realities. This approach enabled participants to see the immediate impact of their actions, inspiring them to contribute to a sustainable future in their daily lives.

Lessons for other brands

Ant International’s campaign offers invaluable insights for brands aiming to elevate their sustainability initiatives. “Brands can learn from this campaign by leveraging phygital experiences and community-driven narratives to make sustainability engaging and impactful. By utilising digital tools and showcasing local, relatable heroes, they can transform abstract goals into tangible, measurable outcomes,” Bev elaborated.

Chris Foster, CEO of The Next Practice, emphasised, “At the core of sustainability marketing lies the belief that change begins with engagement. This AR experience seamlessly bridges the physical and digital worlds, immersing people in a vision of a better future and their ability to contribute. By fostering connection and motivating action, we empower individuals to be part of the solution. This represents the future of sustainability—where inspiration drives meaningful, collective change.”

Sustainability marketing is not a fad; it is a marketing paradigm for long-term brand success. Today’s consumers demand transparency, environmental stewardship, and meaningful action. By leveraging tools like augmented reality and digital innovations, brands can craft immersive narratives that deeply resonate with audiences.

Engaging with smaller communities and amplifying their sustainable practices not only brings authentic stories to the forefront but also strengthens the social and economic fabric of these regions. Embracing sustainability marketing positions brands as leaders in driving positive change, building trust and loyalty in an increasingly sustainability-conscious marketplace.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – AEON Bank has recently introduced ‘Neko Missions’ a gamification-based stamp programme, and are designed to enhance customer engagement and elevate their overall banking experience during their daily transactions.

The new feature was developed to promote greater synergy with AEON’s wider ecosystem, namely merchant partners such as ZUS Coffee and Tealive. AEON Bank’s effort to promote cashless transactions is also supported by PayNet via Neko Missions DuitNow QR programme.

Prior to this, AEON Bank has already embedded the widely–used AEON Points Programme into its digital banking app, which rewards customers that shop at AEON stores nationwide. This move has made it the only bank in the country to establish a retail loyalty programme integrated within its mobile banking app. 

The new Neko Missions aims to spark joy by introducing exciting rewards in customers’ everyday digital payment. Neko Missions’ virtual stamps called Neko Paws can be collected via AEON Bank app by clicking on the ‘Rewards’ icon and completing the Neko Missions. The current Neko Missions features AEON’s retail star tenant, ZUS Coffee, as well as PayNet’s DuitNow. 

From now until 31 March 2025, for every Neko Missions x DuitNow QR transactions of RM20 and above, customers can collect one Neko Paw, limited to two per day. A set of 10 Neko Paws can be redeemed into 1,000 AEON Points (worth RM5) via AEON Bank app.

Meanwhile, for Neko Missions x ZUS Coffee, from now until 31 May 2025, customers need to use their AEON Bank Debit Card-i to pay for their ZUS Coffee (minimum purchase of RM7) and they will be entitled to earn one Neko Paws. Upon collection of 6 Neko Paws, the rewards can be redeemed via the ZUS Coffee app.

YM Raja Teh Maimunah Raja Abdul Aziz, CEO at AEON Bank, said, “Digital banking has the potential to be more than just a payment and transaction tool. We aim to elevate the mobile banking experience for our customers by optimising it as a medium of engagement between customers and their favourite F&B or retail brands.”

She added, “Neko Missions infuses fun in daily payment and shopping activities, making cashless financial habits more dynamic. We will further develop our loyalty programme and through Neko Missions, we will explore partnerships with various merchants partners within our ecosystem, while leveraging on each others’ USP and customers brand affinity.”

Meanwhile, Azrul Fakhzan B. Mainor, senior director of commercial at PayNet, commented, “Our strategic collaboration with AEON Bank enhances Malaysia’s digital payments landscape by delivering a seamless, secure, and rewarding digital payment experience. With Neko Missions, we are integrating incentives into everyday transactions, encouraging more Malaysians to embrace cashless payments while enjoying meaningful rewards. This will strengthen customer engagement, as well as accelerate the shift toward a more connected, inclusive, and digitally empowered economy.”

Singapore – Global partnership management platform impact.com has launched ‘impact.com/advocate,’ a customisable customer referral marketing solution that empowers brands to engage their customers effectively with tailored offers. With custom and highly engaging referral programs that fit their unique business needs, brands can now build authentic, profitable, and scalable partnerships with their customers.

With ‘impact.com/advocate,’ brands can build flexible, fully automated referral marketing programs that are straightforward to manage and easy for their customers to use. The platform streamlines customer referral marketing, known for its ability to drive customer advocacy, community, and attract new customers entering the discovery phase.

The new solution builds on impact.com’s 2023 acquisition of SaaSquatch, a best-in-class provider of customer referral software. The native integration of SaaSquatch’s offering with impact.com’s innovative platform allows brands to leverage customer referrals via impact.com’s existing suite of tools and technologies, providing the most robust and comprehensive partnership marketing ecosystem.

Moreover, with ‘impact.com/advocate,’ brands will be able to build programs that fit their unique strategy and business goals with impact.com’s flexible and configurable program builder, as well as offer rewards their audiences care about and incentivize participation by gamifying their programs with leaderboards and reward exchanges. 

In addition, it will allow brands to create on-brand and easy-to-use referral experiences and embed them at top conversion points in the customer journey, and review and optimise a program’s performance with impact.com’s robust tracking and analytics capabilities.

Antoine Gross, general manager for Southeast Asia and India at impact.com, said, “Today’s modern buyer no longer trusts conventional advertising techniques; they’re seeking out reviews and recommendations from people they can trust and searching social media where they can see the product being used. And we’re seeing that referrers aren’t just making recommendations for their own benefit, but they’re altruistically helping their network access great products and benefits. It’s a type of partnership that feels less transactional, and driven more by genuine care and connection, which adds a unique depth to our offering.”

He added, “With the launch of impact.com/advocate, brands can access a seamlessly integrated referral partnership solution that empowers them to engage their customers authentically through tailored referral programs. All while allowing them to manage all their partnerships — traditional affiliates, influencers, media publishers, other businesses and now customer referral marketing — from one, unified platform.”

The new marketing solution launch follows impact.com’s impact.com recent research on the state of referral marketing in Singapore, revealing that consumers in the country overwhelmingly rely on peer recommendations for purchase decisions. 

It found that a staggering 83% say a recommendation or referral from someone they know is important, with nearly half (49%) of young adults (aged 18-35) finding it very influential. This preference aligns with the decline of traditional advertising effectiveness, with only 2% finding ads impactful in their buying choices. 

Interestingly, while recommendations are valued, 1 in 5 shoppers in the country (18%) feel uncomfortable recommending solely for a reward. This highlights the power of genuine endorsements, with 68% of referrers preferring a system that rewards both themselves and the recipients.

Singapore – The National Library Board has teamed up with LePub APAC to launch an innovative project called ‘Playbrary’ that turns books into games with the aim of reviving reading. 

In this game-changing initiative, books are literally transformed into interactive text adventure games, blending the timeless charm of storytelling with the engagement of digital gameplay. 

Through cutting-edge AI technology, Playbrary transforms conventional books into captivating text-based adventure games. Staying true to the book’s original storyline, these games offer dynamic interaction, enabling players to shape the narrative’s direction. Beyond adapting to player choices, the AI enriches the experience by generating vivid images to complement the text, resulting in a fully immersive and multisensory experience.

Playbrary is in partnership with OpenAI, integrating it seamlessly with ChatGPT and allowing users to engage with these literary adventures directly through the platform. 

Furthermore, Playbrary offers a free prompt generator, ensuring that everyone can enjoy the fusion of reading and gaming. Once kids ‘play’ a story, they can borrow the original from the National  Library Board, Singapore’s catalogue of books and eBooks. 

The Playbrary was born out of the challenge libraries globally face, which is keeping books relevant in an age dominated by digital distractions. More than just a digital library, Playbrary is an interactive journey through literature, where stories are not merely read but experienced. 

Moreover, beyond just entertainment, the initiative will also serve as an accessible educational tool for many. By gamifying the reading process, it presents a novel solution to the dwindling interest in traditional reading among younger generations. 

The National Library Board’s initiative hopes to solve the issue of younger generations losing interest in traditional reading.

Playbrary has the ability to turn any book in the public domain into a game since AI has read all of them already. With this, more than 1,000 classic books will be playable at launch, and LePub APAC is also inviting authors and publishers to add their books to Playbrary. 

Ng Cher Pong, chief executive officer of the National Library Board Singapore, said, “This is part of NLB’s ongoing efforts to make generative AI accessible to all. Our partnership with LePub APAC opens new, innovative ways for more people to read and learn. Through the gamification experience of Playbrary, we hope to encourage more Singaporeans to read these classics after playing the game. We also invite like-minded partners onboard to explore emerging technologies that inspire new ways of interaction with NLB’s resources, such as through GenAI.” 

Meanwhile, Cyril Louis, executive creative director at LePub APAC, shared, “As Playbrary begins its journey, it stands as a testament to Singapore’s innovative spirit and a potential beacon for the future of libraries in the digital age. Playbrary celebrates books through the lens of technology, inviting a new generation to rediscover the magic of stories in a format that resonates with their digital-first lifestyle. Once they’ve ‘played’ a story on Playbrary, many kids will be curious to read the original.” 

Hanh Kanssen, managing director at LePub APAC, also added, “Playbrary is an exciting project for LePub, which not only helps to rekindle a love for reading in young adults but is also a great educational resource. I am very proud of our great creative team behind this creation, who helped to make this project happen at the speed of light so that people all over the world can discover the joy of reading.” 

Singapore – Global mobile video advertising company AdColony, which is now under Digital Turbine, has launched its new masterclass called the ‘Game Academy’ centered around the message of qualification courses focused on marketing solutions in gaming.

Through ‘Game Academy’, users will be able to access a series of bite-sized videos that are designed to effectively impart knowledge and insights related to gaming and mobile game advertising. The platform is free to use, and videos are accessible anytime on demand.

For the first series of the masterclass, topics include but are not limited to the boom in mobile usage, how gaming has redefined pop culture, and a breakdown of gamer personas. Upon completing each lesson, users will unlock a new badge. After successfully completing all lessons, graduates will receive a certificate which they may display on their LinkedIn profiles and resumes.

According to the company, the purpose of “Game Academy” is to give confidence and knowledge to marketers that play in the gaming and advertising space. They also added that whether they are exploring gaming advertising for the first time, or one needs a refresher before stepping into a critical meeting that discusses gaming advertising, Game Academy is designed to be an effective tool in learning about this new world.

“The launch of Game Academy’s first season marks a culmination of months of hard work by many stakeholders, it has already received some great feedback from our brand and agency partners, and we are now looking forward to welcoming many more students in Asia-Pacific,” the company said in a press statement.

Tom Simpson, senior vice president for APAC at AdColony, said, “Successful marketing has always been based on keeping as closely in step with consumers behaviours, but the explosion of gaming consumption means marketers are now racing to catch up with new habits, audiences, and channels. We are very excited to launch Game Academy to elevate how marketers think about gaming advertising and bring the industry as a whole one big step closer to consumers.”

He added, “Gaming has evolved from being a hobby reserved for a select few demographics, to a mainstream form of entertainment where everybody is a gamer of varying degrees. Gaming technology evolves at the speed of light, and advertisers cannot afford to simply play catch-up. The time is now for marketers to fully grasp every aspect of gaming.”

The first season of Game Academy is now available to marketers from any level and company in Asia-Pacific.

Ready? Choose your characters

By now, the word metaverse needs no further introduction. First introduced in 1992 by American science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash as a virtual world where humans used avatars of themselves to escape a dystopian reality, it has since become a buzzword in Silicon Valley and in marketing.

As Mark Zuckerberg said, “The metaverse will bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists; to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centres; and to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited. A realised metaverse could be the next best thing to a working teleportation device.”

Sounds amorphous? There is no denying the immense market opportunity for businesses and brands in this space. Bloomberg Intelligence predicted that the market opportunity could hit USD 800 billion by 2024. In 2021 alone, we have seen a multitude of brands tapping into the metaverse to create brand experiences for their target audiences. Nike’s Nikeland and Ralph Lauren’s The Winter Escape were launched on Roblox, and Luxury Marketplace UNXD will launch a metaverse Fashion Week on Decentraland in March 2022.

With all the hype and potential surrounding this emerging evolution of the internet, how can businesses and brands be active and purposeful players with a first-mover advantage?

Move from corporation-first to community-first

The metaverse cannot exist without the participation of avatars ‒ the digital representation of ourselves. Avatars gather around communities that are formed around interests and ideas.

Brands need to learn to engage with existing communities and hand the power back to them. For example, brands gain more traction when they partner with members of the Roblox developer community in creating items and experiences, allowing communities to drive the creation and rewarding them for their efforts.

Blend the real and virtual with digital-twin experiences

A digital twin could be described as the digital representation of a real world entity that is synchronised with the real world. Simply put, they are digital clones of real world objects.

Digital twins will help businesses connect the metaverse closer to reality by linking virtual experiences with real world experiences.

For example, the blockchain-based game Upland allows users to own digital real estates that are mapped to real-world addresses. Each digital property’s value is also tied to an NFT. Now think of the possibilities in which your business or brand can create a digital replica in the metaverse to unravel new data, learnings, and predictions. For example, if you are in a retail business, having a digital twin of your store will help you in predicting your store traffic, queue time, top-selling products, and inventory planning, just to name a few possible advantages.

Tap into the rise of virtual status symbols and engage through collectibles

Image courtesy of Bored Ape Yacht Club

With the metaverse and NFT, status symbols begin to manifest themselves in novel ways in the virtual. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by four NFT novices turned internet rock stars, in which the price of the collection is 52 Ether, above USD 200,000. Adidas has also collaborated with Bored Ape Yacht Club, with Bored Apes decked out in Adidas Stripes. The entire 30,000 NFT collection was sold out in a few hours over two drops.

Brands can tap into the need for authenticity and exclusivity in the digital creator economy and offer limited-edition items or assets that can only be found in the metaverse. ​​Gucci offers The Collector’s Room on Roblox, allowing fans to collect rare and exclusive Gucci items in the metaverse. The creation of virtual products and goods will help brands drive deeper penetration, relevance, and fan-love, be it in the real or virtual world.

Source: blog.roblox.com

Connect through Gamification

The metaverse presents a huge opportunity to redefine engagement through play and a huge component of that lies with gamification. The integration of technology from augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, presents a whole new way to connect and engage with avatars in the metaverse.

The ability to gamify your marketing will align your brand with the play-to-earn gaming models that are gaining massive traction in the mainstream.

For example, Axie Infinity was a breakthrough success in the blockchain-gaming world.

Players on the platform earn tokens by winning battles with their ‘Axies’ against other players. These special tokens can then be sold for fiat money ‒ real cash. But to get an Axie, players have to buy one on the exchange or breed them from existing Axies.

Source: Axie Infinity

For another example that is closer to home on how gamification can apply to marketing in the metaverse, here is a metaverse gaming experience developed by digital marketing agency Lion & Lion for virtual social platform Status-K, where social media, tokens, and real world rewards were integrated.

Source: www.lionandlion.com

Keep on experimenting

At the time of writing, we are still in the very early stages of the metaverse coming into its full potential. There are still quite a few roadblocks on the pathway toward a bona fide metaverse. For example, interoperability. For true interoperability to happen, cross-metaverse bridges need to be enabled, so that millions of users and communities can migrate their avatars and virtual possessions across the metaverses regardless of platforms or corporations.

While these are guiding insights and ideas on how brands and businesses can navigate better in the metaverse, there will always be paradigms that will be disrupted and created. Marketers need to constantly experiment and stay ahead by understanding technology and being open to fresh creative suggestions. The metaverse will allow entertainment, gaming, marketing, retail experiences, and social interactions to converge and evolve in brave new ways and even set the stage for new businesses to arise.

It is an exciting time for both business owners and marketers to explore this space and to constantly rewrite the playbook through unceasing experimentation and invention.

To end off, I will leave with a parting note and reminder from the book Ready Player One by Ernie Cline, “As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

This article is written by Cheelip Ong, chief product officer and regional chief creative officer of Lion and Lion Digital Group.

The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT. This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to have your thought-leadership published on the platform.

Singapore – CapitaLand Investment, the leading global real estate investment manager with a strong Asia foothold, and Shopee, the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, today announced the launch of the second edition of the ‘CapitaLand x Shopee’ 11.11 campaign. The inaugural edition of the campaign was launched in 2020 similarly for the 11.11 sale event of Shopee, and the two aim to replicate the project which had driving the omnichannel model at its heart. 

In 2020, CapitaLand and Shopee launched an integration of online and offline shopper engagement for the campaign to drive sales, traffic, and engagement for six CapitaLand malls through gamification. Following this, in early 2021, Capitaland also launched the virtual shopping mall of its outlet giant IMM on Shopee, making it the first virtual shopping mall from Singapore on the platform. 

For this year’s 11.11 sale event, both partners will be recreating the omnichannel experience for 29 retailers in eight CapitaLand malls over a period of three weeks, from 22 October to 11 November 2021. CapitaLand and Shopee are also bringing back the popular co-branded games from last year’s 11.11 campaign, where shoppers can participate and win attractive vouchers that can be used in-app and at participating physical stores including Toast Box, LiHO, Etude House, and Giordano.

On the continuation of the partnership, Chris Chong, CEO of retail & workspace for Singapore and Malaysia at CapitaLand Investment, said, “This will allow us to enhance retailers’ consumer outreach and further engage with their customers digitally while driving footfall to their physical stores through online marketing efforts.”

From 22 October to 11 November 2021, S$125,000 worth of ShopeePay Scan and Pay vouchers, Shopee vouchers, and eCapitaVoucher will be given in the CapitaLand Lucky Prize game on the Shopee Singapore app. The ShopeePay Scan & Pay vouchers can be redeemed at eight CapitaLand malls, namely Bedok Mall, Bugis+, Bugis Junction, IMM, Funan, Plaza Singapura, Westgate, and JCube. 

Shoppers visiting any of the eight malls can simply scan the QR code at participating merchants and malls to play the ‘CapitaLand x Shopee’ Lucky Prize game and win ShopeePay Scan & Pay voucher to pay for their purchases using ShopeePay at 29 participating CapitaLand merchants’ offline stores. 

Shoppers can also try their luck in the ‘Guess the Weight’ campaign every weekend over the campaign period to win up to S$22,000 worth of eCapitaVoucher and Shopee vouchers. To participate, shoppers can proceed to the atrium of three shopping malls on selected weekends – Bugis+ on 23 and 24 October, Westgate on 30 and 31 October, and Plaza Singapura on 6 and 7 November – to guess the weight of five unexpected combinations of products, where one of them is the combined weight of a Dyson vacuum and a feather. Contestants must get the closest answer to qualify for the prizes.

Zhou Junjie, Shopee’s chief commercial officer, commented, “Following the success of last year’s CapitaLand x Shopee 11.11 campaign, we are excited to join hands with CapitaLand once again to support even more retailers under CapitaLand’s network by digitalizing the shopping experience.”

Zhou Junjie adds, “Shopee has always been passionate about empowering our sellers and brand partners to unlock the full potential of e-commerce to succeed in today’s digital economy. Through this omnichannel integration, we hope to help retailers deepen engagement with new customers, through an exciting and rewarding experience.” 

To find out more about the campaign, shoppers can head to the campaign’s microsite which will go live on 22 October. 

Bangalore, India – Global sportswear and underwear brand Jockey in India has stepped into the gamification marketing territory by launching a newsfeed smartapp game that aims to promote its versatile range of bras.

Made in collaboration with creative tech studio AliveNow, the app aims to create a space that consumers can proactively engage with and learn from the brand online. The app makes for a creative platform for the brand to meet its audience and to subtly create awareness about its different categories of bras – while demonstrating exactly what outfit each bra can perfectly be paired with.

For Karthik Yathindra, AVP for marketing and product management at Jockey India, said app game launch focuses on their JOCKEY Woman Knows Me campaign which focuses on increasing awareness about the versatile range of bras that the brand offers, as well as the campaign’s central thought #BrasAsVersatileAsIAm.

“We wanted to bring this [campaign] alive to consumers in an engaging and memorable way. In addition to many creative engagement pieces on social and digital platforms, we are leveraging gamification that is popular with our target group and helps them engage with the brand seamlessly,” Yathindra said.

The app also incentivizes players such as being on the top of the leaderboard, to stand a chance to be featured on the brand’s social media handles, driving repeat plays and higher brand recall.

“The game is fun and visually stimulating – both great factors when the brand’s objective is to create stickiness and increase awareness about its inner-wear line. Consumers can interact with all the bras from the range as they learn about the perfect outfit pairings – all while having a ton of fun,” Rushali Rastogi, senior account manager at AliveNow, commented.

Malaysia – The pandemic has changed the digital consumption habits of your everyday user. On average, digital consumption rose by over 30% since COVID-19 started. With the increase in digital consumption by consumers, one would assume that it is easier to grab the attention of your audience, however, the opposite is true.

Attention spans are at an all-time low – another byproduct of the pandemic. How then can marketers attract and retain the attention of their target audiences? One of the ways we can do this is through an ever-growing popular term, ‘Gamification’.

Gamification is “the concept of using game design elements in non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging.” By providing an immersive, engaging, and fun experience for users, it is more likely that we would be able to retain their attention which then, in turn, leads to association with your brand.

Unicom Interactive Digital (UID), a Malaysia-based digital company, that focuses on creating immersive experiences for its clients, offers a simple process for brands to start their gamification digital journey.

Through an entire library of games, brands would only need to choose one that is most relevant to their messaging and have it reskinned to its brand colors. Brands can mix and match however they like and can re-skin and customize them to suit their brand and messaging. In addition, the user journey has also been mapped out by the digital agency.

Some of the recent works of UID for brands Maxis, PepperLunch, and Tsubaki

For example, beauty brands could choose UID‘s Face Analysis system for product recommendations or security brands could reskin Space Invaders, or real estate companies could remodel Monopoly. The possibilities are endless.

Jason Yong, founder of UID, commented, “Build a door if opportunity doesn’t knock! The pandemic may have kept us indoors and grounded but it was no reason for us to stop trying. We can only adapt and keep striving in finding new ways to engage with our target audiences. We saw an opportunity to put our skills into helping brands bridge the physical divide with their audiences through gamification and we have never looked back since.”

Coupled with its backend dashboard, UID helps brands make sense of all that raw data the internet provides to deliver campaigns and activations in the new normal.

Haryana, India – India-based gaming content consulting and content distribution company ATechnos has recently launched its gaming as a service (GAAS) platform which aims to distribute gaming content for common users, and give brands an opportunity to gamify their brand campaigns.

The GAAS platform is called ‘GoGames.Run’ and offers a plethora of games for users of all ages, including augmented and virtual reality games with more realistic and intense action. To date, GoGames.Run has over 500 games across categories including action, arcade, casual, board, sports, mystery etc. In addition to this, many new games are added every month.

Apurv Modi, managing director and co-founder at ATechnos believes that cloud gaming is the future and is enabling a radical transformation in the media industry. He also added that they feel very proud that they are able to bring the next level of audience engagement on platforms that have seen massive growth amidst the pandemic.

“With the addition of instant gratifications, the integration can add tremendous value to any platform, whether they want to engage and retain the existing users or add new users. The integration also enables platforms to innovate and bring in revenue from advertisers. We are sure that GoGames.Run gaming platform will have a deep impact on audience consumption patterns,” Modi said.

In addition, ATechnos is also adding the following programs:

  • GoGames.Run Publisher Program can be integrated with the publisher portal in under 5 minutes time and can help publishers to increase user engagement on their portal with gamification.
  • GoGames.Run Developer Program allows any developer to develop their own games and launch on the GoGames.Run network and generate revenue.
  • GoGames.Run Gamification Program enables brands, OTTs, media companies, portals, and telecoms to quickly run various exciting campaigns around gaming which can result in increased user engagement and loyalty. Using ATechnos’ gamification programs, brands can generate huge shout in the market and increase their presence by manifold.

Rahul Jain, vice president for gaming at ATechnos, commented, “With GoGames.Run now available for all platforms including apps, websites, social media platforms and OTT, the window of opportunity for game developers also opens up. We understand the importance of direct-to-consumer access and being able to have a quick turnaround time for revenue generation. GoGames partnerships are truly a win-win-win situation for the platform, the developer, and us.”