Don’t ever tell Peter Daboll that it’s just a game. The CEO of marketing technology innovator Bunchball has taken gaming to a new level for brands and content owners, counting a big win last week with the SyFy Channel to add to a list of clients that have made 2009 a very good year.
“We are having a direct effect on viewer’s behavior and giving them a reason to return to the website that they might not have revisited,” says Daboll. “We’re seeing ad responses for our solution that I have never seen before. We’re talking about motivating behaviors that are way beyond increases in page views. These are powerful emotional engagements.”
Bunchball is a marketing technology company with a cross-channel difference. It creates games and other programs that allow a content owner’s consumers to stay connected and engaged whether it’s on the owner’s website, mobile app, social network or Twitter feed. Last week it added the SyFy Channel to its client roster after working with NBC Universal and USA Network earlier this year. Its SocialLink technology creates and measures the social connectivity between Syfy.com's popular Game Center and social media applications, such as Facebook and Twitter. Game Center visitors can share scores from Syfy.com games like Star Gem and Apollo's Arrow with Facebook friends. In addition, Bunchball is enhancing the user experience on Game Center by making it possible for users to receive challenges to accumulate Game Center points and win trophies to show off on their profile pages.
Bunchball's technology works by plugging into a brand’s Web site, enhancing online communities and promoting consumer interaction and loyalty while driving revenue. That’s why Daboll believes gaming is actually much more than a game. He sees it as the key customer engagement magnet in a business where time spent and emotional connection is the holy grail.
“Creating gaming online is much more than something that’s going to attract the casual gamer or the console audience,” he says. “These are actually serious game dynamics and it allows brands to create engagement without hitting customer over the head to achieve it.”
He calls it “meta-gaming,” and has attracted a fair amount of attention on then thought leadership side. He has had two pieces published in Forbes.com this year. “Any time one of your visitors comes back to your site, you can add the scores for their actions,” he wrote in April. “At the end of the day, every single customer is screaming at you with their actions. If you can assign a value to the actions they take, you know how valuable they are. And with the right tools, you can speak to them, target them, and interact with them appropriately. Because you can see which actions are driving the most value, you can focus your development efforts accordingly. The actions taken by a visitor are a proxy for the value of a particular visitor. When aggregated together, they are a good indicator of the future value of the business.”
Daboll will continue to preach the gospel of engagement to content owners, which he says can be boiled down to “keep it fresh, keep coming up with reason to keep viewers coming back.”
