If your agency is worth its weight in digital strategy (or at least loudly claims to be), you’ve had a least one client come to you with a request for a “social media strategy hunt or something.” Yes, someone forwarded him or her this article from Mashable, and then your client got all sorts of whimsical ideas in his or her head. Ladies and gentleman, this is what happens to people who just find out that gamification is a thing–they want to just gamify everything there is.
Now, usually gamification serves more to confuse consumers than to incite them to action. However, when your client happens to be a video game manufacturer, this is one of the few times when this strategy actually makes sense. In May, Wunderman’s Seattle office decided to gamify the artwork for Halo 4, a video game that their client, Microsoft, uses as the flagship title for its XBOX 360 console. The results, as the above case study irritatingly demonstrates, included press from a variety of publications including this little write-up on Gawker-owned Kotaku.
Really, Wunderman? You charged Microsoft less for this campaign than you spent on the video? Doesn’t that, you know, mean you’re not making any money off of it? I know it’s good for luring new business, but this hardly seems like a very sound strategy.