The best and worst of video game marketing and advertising.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 5:35PM 
You are a modern douche. Living life through a smartphone like a lemming, bumping shoulders with hypnotized strangers right before you (both) tweet about it.
You feel like you deserve the best and we answered this undeserved sense of entitlement by creating stunningly gorgeous HD wallpapers for your iPhone.
They are now downloadable for free here.
Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 10:00AM 
Today's gamers are very different than the stereotype from the 90s of a nerdy, acne-packed boy named Kevin who behaves like a socially awkward penguin and sweats profusely whenever he takes the leap of faith to make extended eye contact with an object of lust.
Latitude Research just released a new study, asking 290 smartphone owners between the ages of 15-54 who self-identified as "gamers" (whether casual or enthusiasts).
;)
One of the most interesting insights of this study comes from this very interesting nuance.
Games have been notorious for changing people's behaviors as they provide a high level of engagement and involvement from their audience.
The emergence of social platforms (whether through 'traditional' social networks like Facebook or social gaming via Xbox Live / PlayStation Network) and location-based technologies have provided opportunities for people to participate in shared experiences engraved with a deeper meaning than the pure thrill of playing.
This seems to resonate in the mind of participants, who also want to see games - and their unique storytelling capacity - do a better job of connecting people and leveraging the power of communities to make an impact in the real world.
If gaming mechanisms can change marketing and advertising, it can surely change lives, too.
This is quite a trite observation by now (like most of the study, to be perfectly honest), but games are now perceived as a medium for self-improvement: personal wellness, learning, etc. Brain Training was released in 2005 and WiiFit in 2008, after all.
The gamification of life inevitably means the gamification of daily, routine, boring activities: running errands, exercising, washing clothes, ironing your man, or guiltily masturbating at night.
This definitely resonates with initiatives like Fiat's brilliant "EcoDrive" initiative, trying to instill gaming mechanics, feedback and incentives when it comes to your driving style.
Infographics are an absolutely delicious way of presenting information. It's been done with great talent and bravado by companies like Wired, GOOD Magazine and many more.
Blogs - like us - love this format because it's visual and it fits within the 5 minutes attention span that we expect our visitors to have (hopefully).
The problem is that it can also over-complexify very straightforward data. And when this data is collected in a very biased way (even though it is being acknowledged a few times in the presentation), the extrapolations that are being made throughout definitely lose their impact.
The implications drawn from the study are shamelessly obvious and only point to the banality of the questions that were asked in the first place.
It's really such a shame that the sense of discovery and elevation that you get while reading this deck vanishes after the first diagram.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 4:10PM 
Market research firm Newzoo is reporting that U.S. consumers are spending $21.6 billion on video games in 2011, just lower than that in 2010.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 11:12AM 
Innovative. Unique. New. Interactive. Engaging. Social. Really really powerful.
Microsoft is introducing new ad units on Xbox Live: NU Ads (Natural User-Interface Ads). NU is how I spell "new" because I am young, and seeing a brand leveraging this peculiar spelling automatically gives it some serious street cred in my mind.
See it in action here (don't forget to look at the "dislike" bar):
What does this video tell us?
You may think "this is spam". I say this is about sharing interests. Teens love doing it. Social networking sites are an amazing tool to show your friends what you like. And being able to instantly tweet about new boring ads with an automatically generated phrase makes this easier than ever before.
Marketers will love those new ad units for how simple they are to deploy, since you just need to repurpose the same commercials that you already use on television.
After all, I love engaging with ads equally no matter what my current activity is: if I am in the mood to go online and play Outland with my friends, I will take 5 minutes of my time and dedicate myself to sharing an Adidas ad with them first, as it will reinforce my sense of belonging.
After all, haven't you always wondered when you were enjoying a good game: "wouldn't it be great if I could take this ad and share it with my friends using a social network?"
I am watching an ad for my favorite lovemark Coca Cola. Not only is it so convincing that I had to go pick up a can from the fridge, but now I see this little banner on my Xbox Live dashboard and cannot resist the urge to click on it using motion gestures (something that "mouse click" or a "button press" cannot achieve in the same powerful and unique way, as they lack the revolutionary power of Kinect).
"The power of Kinect and the power of advertising together can bring engagement for advertisers and consumers to a complete new level.", Enrique de la Garza, Senior Product Planner, Microsoft; while not looking at the camera.
“The new ad units really epitomize the level of engagement that everyone is working towards, [...] You can text, you can tweet, you can vote. That’s phenomenal.”, John M. Lisko, executive communications director of Saatchi & Saatchi LA.
Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 3:58PM 
After nearly a year of inception (BRAAAAWWWWHHHH!), the Flip Flap Man finally releases a new track: "Treadmill Indulgence", mashup between Lykke Li's "Little Bit" and Vandalism's "Smash Disco".
You will run. You will cry. You will sweat the music. You will crap your pants running and ask the Mexican guy to clean them up because you work out at Equinox and you deserve racial domination.
Hope you all enjoy the musical ride.
If you want to check Flip Flap Man's other tracks and mixtapes, check out his SoundCloud profile.
For those interested in the details, this is a mashup of:
With additional samples from:
