This is why for many in the industry Social Networking held so much promise. A chance to engage with a media savvy and ad literate generation of young men hanging out with all those girls on Facebook.
Anyway I stumbled across this table of stats on the estimated probability of competing in professional sport beyond high school and discovered that the success rate from being on the high school team to being a pro-athlete in America ranged from 0.03% to 0.44%.
For example 0.08% of high school Footballers go on to play professionally.
What I found interesting of course is how similar these figures are to the probability of Fans becoming engaged with your brand on Facebook.
As we have seen before a good average engagement rate for a brand on Facebook is above 0.1%, a great engagement rate is above 0.3 – 0.5%.
So what this suggests is if your son is on the high school football he is as likely to play professional football as he is to engage with a leading brand on Facebook.
Something for all those So.Me guru’s out there to ponder I would suggest.
Needless to say the odds are significantly higher that at some stage in the future your aspiring pro footballer will place a bet of a football match. Even if it is only to become involved in the office “Footy Tipping” competition. Nor does it take too much effort to discover that online sports betting is a significantly bigger business than social networking (i.e. Estimates place it at 10 to 20x bigger). While even in the business of Facebook we discover games are among the popular activities and attractions.
The same goes for the smartphone market where it is self-evident from the App Store charts that the iPhone is more Portable Playstation + Phone than Blackberry on steroids.
When it comes to interactive media it would appear the whole world is a game.
Which of course brings us to the whole issue of Gamification.
Today Gamification is officially on the Gartner Hype Cycle. It is also the word you will hear most often in Advertising circles today as they continue with their ongoing efforts try to resolve exactly why the techniques and methods they perfected on TV, Radio and Print just don’t cut through the noise online.
Probably the most interesting champion of these ideas today is Tim Jones the author of a study paper on Gaming Brands and presenter of this TED talk on how we can recreating Brands as games.
To be honest there is nothing here that the pioneers of interactive media were not saying 20-25 years ago. As I have said many times before success in an interactive world comes from engaging the audience by providing them with something they enjoy doing. What is interesting is the generational change that is required for these ideas to go mainstream. Google + Gamification is the new Imagineering for Brands
Having said that there is no evidence that these discussions about the impact of gamification are revolutionising advertising thinking.
Talk to advertising people across the whole spectrum of the industry, be it Mainstream, Digital, PR or DM, and you soon discover that most of them still want to persist in telling stories in a world of virtual currencies, Angry Birds, Farmvilles and MMORPG where actions speak louder than words (or pictures). Sadly they are still plying their trade on the wrong end of the innovation curve and that’s why they are struggling to engage with that key demographic of young males aged between 18-24.
Posted on August 13, 2011
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