TBWA's CMO Laurie Coots on 'gamification'

Coots says that the rise of social media has seen an explosion of ‘gaming’, with brands creating games to engage with consumers. But she points out that it is actually the gamification that secures people’s attention.

“The attraction is not in the game, it’s in the gamification," she says. "It’s in gamifying, it’s in inviting them in, it’s in giving them a reward, helping reward them for their investment – you can use those techniques where you don’t even have a game at all.”

Coots says the concept of gamification is nothing new, pointing to loyalty cards and rewards programmes – even sales tactics emplyed by real -estate agents who show prospective buyers property they can’t afford to make other offerings more attractive.

Having shared the statistic that 80 per cent of branded apps, of which 99.9 per cent are free, get less than 1,000 downloads, Coots says some brands get dazzled by “the new shiny object” that is technology.

She says that brands might want an app because they’re the new in-thing, and that agencies will offer to do one because they’re keen to try something new. But both parties are doing that because they 'can' rather than because they 'should'.

At its heart, she says, gamification should be fun. “In the movie ‘Big’ the man-boy character is working with the toy developers who show him a robot that turns into a building, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ he asks, ‘Who wants to play with a building?’”