“Gaming has come of age,” and is no longer confined to “Joystick-obsessed guys who once hunkered down in basements for hours,” Adweek declares in this week’s Digital Special Issue looking at the hobby in depth.

Despite the fact that Adweek also said that in 2009, there’s no doubt that today, gaming is fertile ground for marketers to reach consumers across numerous demographics in innovative and engaging ways. It seems like every month there’s a new study that aims to break our assumptions about who gamers are (the audience is older than you think and skews more female than you think), and the proliferation of mobile devices as gaming platforms means that more and more of people’s idle time is now spent gaming – which, for a savvy marketer, is an opportunity to reach people.

Adweek’s special issue is packed with some great insights into gaming culture and opportunities for marketers that are definitely worth checking out. Below we recap a handful of articles from the issue.

Beyond Breakout takes a look at how brands can offer game experiences in the real world through platforms like Foursquare or technologies like QR Codes and UPC scanners. It can be tough for brands to get involved, though, as our own Sarah Hofstetter noted in the piece: “When you’re comparing [smartphone-based outreach] to a 30-second TV spot-a reach of 1 million versus tens of millions — it’s hard to connect the dots.” Getting large brands to sign on to real-world gaming initiatives, she adds, “is a matter of convincing marketers that there’s scale and reach.”

The rewards are there, though — connecting the digital world to the real world is a great way to extend the online experience deeper into a consumer’s lifestyle. For brands that deal with customers as an intermediary between their supply chain, it’s also a great way to give some extra love to those customer partners by incentivizing consumers to interact with their physical locations.

The Real Deal takes a look at the very cool “Birth of a Spartan” series Microsoft put out to promote its upcoming title Halo: Reach, the latest in an extremely successful franchise. The article discusses how more and more live action content is being used to promote games, but I think there’s something else at play here. The reason these features are so popular is that gamers dying for in-universe content between major franchise release, which can be separated by years.

Marketers that are promoting entertainment properties with strong followings can keep the fires burning and even increase interest levels with short-form content during the off-season. Some networks like NBC have tried this with Webisodes, but a key differentiator with “Birth of a Spartan” is the budget — Microsoft dropped $10MM to give the series a level of polish most Web series can’t aspire to.

Madden NFL 11: The Ad Game goes into the latest product integration in Madden NFL 11, and how it can go wrong. In the latest incarnation of the popular football franchise, Electronic Arts added a new, branded player statistic — “Swagger” — sponsored by Old Spice. Many Madden fans are annoyed — even though Madden as a franchise has in general been pretty ad-heavy. The big problem being articulated is that previous brand integrations haven’t had any effect on gameplay, while the Swagger stat actually has an impact of the player’s performance. As a general rule, brands getting into the nuts and bolts of how games operate, rather than being more cosmetic, is very risky — especially in games that are played competitively.

So what should marketers be considering in the wide-open space of gaming, and when is gaming a good idea for a marketing plan? A couple of thoughts:

• Value exchange is critical: If you’re going to integrate your brand into a game experience or even interrupt a game experience with your brand, it’s absolutely essential that you provide some value to the gamer. Gaming isn’t like television in that ads aren’t considered part of the deal, and if you interrupt a game experience without offering something in return, your brand will be the target of considerable ire.
• Games are great to re-engage an audience: Because of their long lead-time and high cost, games aren’t ideal for one-off campaigns, but for continuity programs, they can be a fantastic way to encourage an audience to engage with a microsite, Facebook page, or other online property over and over again.
• You don’t have to launch a game all at once: Trying to create an engaging game is a daunting task, but fortunately, you don’t have to do it all at once. Farmville has been wildly successful at maintaining it’s user base for a long period of time, in part because they launch features over time – they didn’t try to create the whole experience at once and then release it into the wild, they created a framework and rolled out new features every couple of weeks, which gave users a reason to return.
• Games can be anywhere: If you want to get your brand into gaming, it doesn’t necessarily mean creating the next Modern Warfare. You can add game elements to nearly any sort of online or even real-life experience – as evidenced by platforms like Foursquare, MyTown, and SCVNGR. For a deep dive into this concept, check out Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 talk about the future of gaming in real life – the good stuff starts about 21 minutes in.

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What do you think? Will marketers soon begin making the most of opportunities in gaming? Let us know in the comments below.

As partners with Oreo on this initiative, we at 360i are looking forward to unveiling the refreshed page to Oreo lovers worldwide on Monday. Though the page has been up since August 2009, its focus to date has primarily been the American audience. However, a large volume of comments and “Likes” from global Oreo fans prompted the amended strategy which will engage fans of the brand from all corners of the world.

Mark Clouse, senior vice president for global biscuits at Kraft Foods, told the Times’ Stuart Elliott that the outpour of global engagement created an “a-ha moment” for the brand. He went on to say that Kraft sees Facebook as “a global vehicle and a platform” that can be leveraged to create dialogue with all consumers – wherever they may be.

Clouse said the page will offer a hybrid of local and global content, acknowledging that though the brand resonates differently in different markets there are also universal elements to the Oreo brand. One feature fans can expect to see is a “world’s fan of the week” distinction for the most devoted Oreo lovers.

A huge portion of brands on Facebook treat their pages as entirely U.S.-focused, when the reality is there that 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S., and any page with a large organic fan base will likely have a high percentage of their connections outside the U.S.

With that in mind, there are a few of 360i’s best practices that any global brand can follow to up the relevancy of their content and ensure that they’re not alienating their international consumers:

Target product-related messaging to relevant markets: For most global brands, not all products are available in all markets. If a brand is promoting a product that’s only available in the U.S. and Canada, the post should be targeted to those markets so that consumers in other markets aren’t confused or disappointed when they can’t purchase.

Publish brand equity messaging in multiple languages: There’s a temptation for marketers to use a Facebook page purely as a vehicle to promote specific products or programs, but users who “Like” your brand respond far more readily to simple brand equity messaging that communicates the emotional payoff of a product. For brands that have strong fan bases in international markets, it’s important to translate those simple messages into the primary languages of those markets so that everyone can share in the brand experience.

Give international brands the power to create content: No one person can create content that’s perfectly relevant to people all around the world – there are linguistic and cultural barriers, differences in brand positioning from market to market, and different levels of comfort and understanding of a brand’s promise. To create engaging content for multiple markets on a Facebook page, the community manager will have to form a close partnership with brand managers around the world who can provide timely and relevant copy to publish.

Keep the power to publish closely held: Although it takes input from a wide range of stakeholders to make a global Facebook page successful, the power to actually publish to the page should be restricted to a small handful of key personnel.

Many brand pages have dozens of administrators from different groups and different companies — check your Facebook pages now – are there any admins on them who work for agencies you don’t work with anymore? Any employees who have moved on? It’s easy for confusion to arise with so many administrators, especially when managing a global page that draws content from multiple markets, and keeping the administrator list slimmed down will help prevent mis-posting, repeat posts, and other publishing misfires.

In March, Oreo named 360i as its lead digital agency.

-Katie Perry, Associate Marketing Manager at 360i, contributed to this report.

Game developers like Zynga have thrown a major spotlight on social gaming with titles like “Farmville” and “Cafeworld.” At the same time, these games are bucking another major trend, that of subscription online gaming. The model that made “World of Warcraft” such a huge money-maker for Blizzard and Activision might be ready to surrender to so-called “Free to Play” games.Anyone who’s played Farmville is familiar with how most free-to-play games work — you can get started for free, and if you’re content with a baseline gameplay experience you can continue that way. If you pay, you get a bit more, from in-game items to quick advancement through the game’s challenges.

And boy, can you pay. A pre-teen in the U.K. racked up $1300 in charges buying “Farmville” credits on his parents’ credit card, the Guardian reported last week. While that sort of consumer isn’t entirely typical, having an engaging game with what’s called an “elastic velvet rope” — a paywall that lets people go farther the more they pay — is almost a license to print money.

Take “League of Legends” — a real-time strategy game with premium graphics and a robust multiplayer experience that is totally free to download (though you can also buy it at Walmart, if you desperately need to have a physical copy), and seemingly free to play — but not exactly. The game has dozens of playable characters, only a fraction of which are available at any given time. If you always want to play your favorite character, you can pay. And, if you’re willing to pay a bit more, you can purchase cosmetic upgrades to your characters, as well — turn your Pirate character into a ghost pirate, for example.

Free-to-play games are a great place for brands interested in getting into the gaming space.  Players have proven themselves willing to pay to receive in-game benefits, so it follows they’d certainly be willing to sample a product, watch a movie trailer, or take a survey for in-game benefits as well.

Indeed, a solid free-to-play game could take the place of a loyalty program for a brand willing to invest. After all, it’s much easier to give someone a virtual T-shirt when they trade in 50 Reward Points than to mail them an actual T-shirt. And a brand wouldn’t even need to develop a game on its own, as there are plenty of free-to-play games or gaming communities that exist already, whose usage far exceeds even the most effective brand loyalty programs out there.

Last month was the annual DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit, and there was one talk in particular that captured a lot of imaginations — Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell’s “Design Outside the Box” talk, which covered Facebook, convergence, and the future of reality-based gaming.I knew this talk was generating tons of buzz when, at a recent conference I attended, it was heavily copied by not one but two separate presenters. The biggest takeaway from Schell’s presentation — and you should definitely watch the whole thing if you have the time — is that games that connect to reality, either by letting you compete with your friends, or by awarding you points for real-world activities, exert a special kind of psychological hold on gamers, especially casual gamers.

Social apps like Foursquare are currently taking advantage of this concept, and they’re also getting partners like Bravo into the act, awarding users badges for checking into locations that appear on the “Real Housewives” TV shows and eating at “Top Chef” restaurants. The TV network is essentially giving Foursquare users points and recognition for living the Bravo lifestyle.

Brands have been awarding points for their users for ages. They’re called loyalty programs, and some are remarkably effective, while others sort of fall flat. The key difference is social currency. People want to be associated with loyalty programs that say something about them as people other than “I buy a ton of this specific product.”

The example Schell gives in his talk is tooth-brushing. In his vision of the future, toothpaste companies will award you points for brushing your teeth, and badges or bonuses for doing it every day in a week, or twice in a single day, and they’ll do it in the name of getting you to buy more toothpaste. But consumers will take part in that not because they want to be known as Crest aficionados or Colgate partisans, but because they want to be known as people with extremely clean teeth.

Schell’s talking about the nebulous future, but there’s plenty of time in the present for brands to get involved in game concepts like awarding points and Xbox Live-style “achievements” to real-life, branded activities. Consumers are hungry for ways to measure their lifestyles against their social nets, and brands can win by offering them a way to do that.

This article was originally published in MediaPost’s Gaming Insider.

That said, with all the tools available on the wide variety of social media and content sites, there are many ways that companies without a lot of experience in gaming can nonetheless create a strong casual game offering without necessarily outsourcing or hiring someone with the video game developer skill set. A great example is a  a simple choose-your-own adventure game developed by the English Metropolitan Police, designed to educate British youths about the dangers and consequences of carrying knives (and the fact that British police can search you without probable cause, apparently). The game, while very slickly produced, only requires a solid understanding of YouTube annotation functionality and video production skills — something any medium-to-large-sized firm should be able to muster.

An advergame doesn’t necessarily have to be developed from the ground up. The existing tools that exist in the social media space provide a great playground to work with — with the extra benefit of being spaces where users implicitly understand the rules and mechanics by which you can play. For brands looking to get their feet wet in the world of gaming, they might be a great place to start.

EA’s “Sin to Win” promo should have aligned with social marketing best practices instead of conforming to crude gamer stereotypes.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” goes the famous quote by H.L. Mencken, which many marketers seem to take to heart. After all, if you want to maximize your reach, you ought to appeal to the lowest common denominator, right? Wrong, as Electronic Arts found out this week, as its “Sin to Win” promotion for the upcoming “Dante’s Inferno” inspired an enormous amount of backlash which eventually forced the company to apologize for the whole scheme.

The Cliff Notes version of the promotion is that EA was encouraging Comic-Con attendees to “Commit acts of lust” with “booth babes” (by which they simply meant “take a picture with a booth babe”) and then tweet a photo link to the Dante’s Inferno development team’s feed with a #Lust hashtag appended. The grand prize, according to the flyer handed out at Comic-Con, was a “night of lust” with two of said booth babes (by which they meant a chaperoned dinner).

The backlash followed pretty quickly on the heels of the promotion’s announcement and from all directions. Gamers, feminists, and marketers all seemed to agree that this idea was pretty horrible.

The backlash against this promotion is a perfect example of how, in social marketing, you can indeed go broke underestimating the intelligence or moral fiber of your audience. While it’s true that sex still sells (and probably always will), social marketing is less about appealing to people’s basest instincts, and more about inspiring people’s urges to create, share, or criticize. So, when gamers felt insulted by EA’s promotion, rather than participating, they instead chose to criticize, and to share their criticism far and wide.

Gaming companies seem to fall into this trap fairly often; Sony had the most memorable example in recent history with its PSP flog that was written in a ridiculous faux-urban patois and utterly failed to elicit anything but brutal criticism. Gamers hate being underestimated or talked down to, and the lesson EA has learned here is that doing so in a social environment is a recipe for disaster.

EA’s done right by social marketing before, though — take for example its promotions for “Spore,” where the company distributed the Spore Creature Creator months ahead of the game’s release, and encouraged users to create creatures, record videos of them, and upload to YouTube. A million creatures were created in a single week.

It’s vitally important that any social marketing program follow the best practices of the platform it’s based on, and talking down to your audience is never a best practice. When EA appealed to its customers’ intelligence and creativity rather than relying on crude gamer stereotypes, it was rewarded with an active and engaged audience, and one of the best-selling PC games of all time.

This article was originally published in MediaPost’s Gaming Insider.

Most games that include moral choices let users choose between hero and villain — with no options in between (image via Flickr).

As video games continue to mature as a medium, one of the major narrative elements being included in AAA titles is the idea of your character’s moral choices having an effect on the outcome of the game and the game world itself. Some of the top games of the last year have incorporated this element, including “nFamous” and “Fable 2″ (where your character’s moral choices not only affect the world, but also your character’s appearance, ranging from saintly to devilish). Several major upcoming titles are also using this element: “Mass Effect 2″ and “Dragon Age,” to name two, both currently under development by BioWare.

But there’s a problem with this approach. In almost every game that features these kinds of moral decisions, the choices aren’t just easy, they’re totally transparent. The first decision you make is whether you want the character to be the good guy or the bad guy, and then all decisions you must make to achieve that outcome are predetermined: Feed the puppy to be the good guy, kick it to be the bad guy. As former Activision developer James Portnow put it in his column this week on Gamasutra: “We tend to deliver to our players all the exciting possibilities of either being Mother Theresa or being Hitler.”

Developing some shades of gray into this spectrum of choices is critical for video game’s development as a medium. People don’t read books or watch movies because it’s 100% clear what the characters should do all the time; stories are at their best when characters have to make hard choices.

And every human being who’s spent a modicum of time thinking about right and wrong knows that’s not at all how it works — you can decide up front how you want to live your life, but putting that decision into practice is the hard part. In video game world, it’s the opposite — once you’ve made the decision about who you want to be, making the decisions to bring that about is the easy part, and in most games, you’ve got a handy progress bar telling you exactly how good or evil your actions have made you.

One issue with the shades-of-gray approach is that it violates a general tenet of game development: that player’s actions should have predictable outcome sets. But until a healthy dose of ambiguity is introduced into these systems, moral choices in games will never have the same resonance that they do in other media.

This article was originally published in MediaPost’s Gaming Insider.

Integrating Facebook with Xbox 360 would let gamers leverage the power of community to seek out more compatible opponents (Image via Flickr).

Last week, my colleague Josh touched on the new social features Microsoft is adding to the Xbox 360 – Facebook Connect and Twitter functionality that will allow users to broadcast their gaming activities to their friends.

As one of Josh’s commenters noted, bringing Facebook onto Xbox is of limited utility. Without an easy-to-use keyboard, at least as easy as a mobile phone keyboard, for example, the main use for access to your Facebook account on Xbox Live will be to ping friends to come join you in-game, or to show off your gamer score.

But the addition of social networking functionality could well solve a significant problem facing console multiplayer gaming – the current matchmaking system. While usually effective at setting up games quickly and easily, it makes it very difficult to be discerning in one’s choice of gaming partners. Anybody who’s played Halo 3 with a group of people who use ethnic slurs like punctuation marks has had this experience.

Currently, Xbox Live is well set up to support playing with friends or playing with strangers, but there isn’t a lot of gray area between those two groups.

There’s no way, for example, for someone at a company to play with all his or her co-workers unless he’s friends with all of them, or for a student to play with other people from his or her university. Xbox Live is good at helping you set up 1- or 2-degree social nets, but its support for groups or larger networks is practically nonexistent.

This is something that connecting with Facebok could shore up. The real value for Xbox Live to hook up with Facebook isn’t in broadcasting activity. The value is this: It pulls social connections into the Xbox Live system to help people find fellow gamers they can get along with.

This article was also published in MediaPost’s Gaming Insider. You can view the original article at MediaPost.com.

Starbucks’ Facebook Page  (shown above) is just the whipped cream on the Frappuccino – the brand also has a popular Twitter feed and MyStarbucksIdea.com (image via Flickr).

Starbucks has recently been on the receiving end of some bad buzz in social media, with netizens on Twitter, YouTube and the blogosphere targeting the company’s record on union issues, lambasting Starbucks as a bad employer. The video that kicked off the whole campaign accuses Starbucks of “a history of union busting,” and the campaign operates under the aegis of “Stop Starbucks” (or #stopstarbucks on Twitter).

These kinds of allegations have haunted a wide variety of major brands. But Starbucks seems to be weathering the storm extraordinarily well, thanks in part to its robust social media presence: Starbucks has a Twitter feed that regularly @ messages other Twitter users, thus proving the company is listening, providing value to brand advocates and encouraging constructive conversation around the brand.

Starbucks has an extremely active Facebook page with an aggressive editorial calendar that engages its fans and gives them an inside look at the internal workings of the company. And finally, Starbucks has its very own user community, MyStarbucksIdea.com, where Starbucks customers can suggest ideas for improving Starbucks products or locations, and see ideas other users have submitted.

And these social media presences are drowning out the “hater” sites. When you check out MyStarBucksIdea and look for union issues, you can find them – they’re buried beneath other topics, including whether Starbucks should carry ceramic cups for customers who want to drink their coffee in the shop, whether Starbucks should offer dark chocolate beverages, and even whether Starbucks should encourage discussion of art and culture in their stores. Without the branded communities that Starbucks has created, it’s possible that many of these conversations wouldn’t even be happening, and it’s certain that if they were happening, they wouldn’t be nearly as visible.

The disparity between the volume of conversation about Starbucks on social media and the conversations around the Stop Starbucks campaign is pretty shocking. For example, last week over 16,000 people tweeted about Starbucks, and only a handful of them mentioned the Stop Starbucks campaign in any way. In addition, the average Starbucks twitterer during that week had almost twice as many followers as the average StopStarbucks twitterer.

We talk a lot on this blog about the great things that building a strong social media presence can do for marketers. Here’s a great example of how maintaining that social media presence can help avert disaster. Building this kind of community on the Web can help insulate marketers’ brands from brand detractors by creating and amplifying the voices of brand evangelists, thus bringing positive conversations about the brand to the forefront of the social Web.

Microsoft’s Project Natal demo – specifically its innovation in motion control – stood out at this year’s E3 event.

E3 rolled around again this week. It’s generally pretty tough to sift through the manifold hype around the event and pick out the coolest, most innovative demo at the show. Except this year, of course – Microsoft made it pretty easy, with Project Natal.

Looking at the demo videos, it’s amazing to think that this whole motion control thing began with the Wiimote, and now has grown into something that could revolutionize UIs in general – did anyone else see the demos and immediately begin wishing for something like this? But beyond the possibilities for computing generally, what Natal does for gaming – especially casual gaming – is incredible.

While I doubt that motion control – even motion control that’s more refined than what’s currently available – will entirely replace a controller, it’s another big step in removing barriers between non-gamers and games. Ultimately, the goal with Natal is to allow anyone to intuitively control a game, using only the knowledge of how to move their bodies. The Wiimote has already made huge strides in this respect, and Nintendo has the sales numbers to show for it. And to a certain extent, success for Nintendo is success for gaming as a whole – the more people are acclimated to playing accessible games, the more gaming continues to become part of mainstream popular culture.

So Natal is a great opportunity for the future of gaming, but now let’s all hope it doesn’t get totally fouled up. While the Wii’s motion controls were fantastic for the accessibility of gaming, the system produced a truly amazing amount of absolutely awful shovelware, which nonetheless seems to sell copies at least in part because of the novelty of motion control. If Natal ends up being a goldmine for developers who want to cash in on a new control system, it’ll pretty quickly stop looking like the future of gaming and start being another source for waggle jokes.