New Creative for Video Game Rating System

By Duane Brown | Published: January 8, 2010

Cristina Gomez created some really cool new material for her senior thesis at Middle Tennessee State. Check out the work over at GameSetWatch.

Posted in Marketing | Leave a comment

Redesigning Wicked Interactive’s Website

By Duane Brown | Published: January 2, 2010

Client: Wicked Interactive

Website: www.WickedInteractiveltd.com

Services: Strategic Planning & Brainstorming

Company Description
Wicked Interactive Ltd. is an online games publisher, founded in 2008, and based out of Toronto, Canada. Through its Suba Games platform, Wicked Interactive creates a centralized destination where North American gamers can access a range of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games.

Work
September – October 2009

Started working with Wicked Interactive and looking all the different items they were trying to get done on their list of goals. One of the areas was relooking at their website and home page to a greater degree. The company is looking to intermediate itself and change the company and the video game industry over the next few years. I started working on some designs on the home page and this is the first of many drafts that stuck with the company’s management team. It’s currently being refined more as the design gets pushed throughout the rest of the website.

Outcome
You can check out the image below for a first draft of their home page. It’s still very much a work in progress and one that has been put on hold as other items need to be taken care of.

Mock Homepage

Posted in Client(s) & Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

Helping Arion Focus Grow Their Community

By Duane Brown | Published: December 30, 2009

Client: Arion Focus

Website: www.Breeders.Net & www.Doggies.com

Services: Market Research, Competitive Analysis, Strategic Planning & Brainstorming and Google Analytics

Company Description
Arion Focus runs two websites: Breeders.Net is a site geared towards helping people find a dog breeder(s) in a city close to their home across North America. They also fun Doggies.com, which is for dog owners to get together and share in the love of their pet.

Work
September – November 2009

I was refereed to Arion Focus by one of my friends in the industry. They were looking to get into social media but weren’t sure what to do or what opportunities to go after. They are competing with websites like Dogster and with a small staff could only tap into a few opportunities to start. I started out by researching where their competitors were using social media both actively and passively and or places they had abandoned accounts. I like to start with using KnowEm and then Social Mention to help give me a better lay of the land with a client and their competitors.

After doing a lot of the research and looking at the competition and what they were doing. I was able to start to put together a 6 month social media plan for the client. The plan looked at getting the client to post more useful content to their blog by harnessing the power of the data and information in their Google Analytics.  I also looked at them using a service like uStream to launch a video series early next year. The end goal of these two initiatives was to get the community more involved by answering questions they have about buying and raising a dog. Also, the video series was going to be a video about different community members and promote that person for the week. I also looked at getting the client into Twitter and how a websites like twitpets.com can help them connect better with a passionate community.

Outcome
It’s to early in the process to start seeing and true metrics for Arion Focus. I’m keeping in constant contact with the team and making sure that they have my full support and help with anything that they need. We’ll be doing a big debrief next month to learn how the first part of their social media efforts are going. This will give us a better idea of how to help plan for the rest of 2010 and beyond.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Ubisoft Wants the Female Market

By Duane Brown | Published: December 28, 2009

Ubisoft wants to start spending more money and go after the other half of the video game industry, females: Ubisoft Gets in Touch With Female Side. The article talks about how half of gamers are female and don’t get marketed as much. However, the latter part of that statement is not true. Female gamers have been marketed to every since EA bought Pogo.com all those years ago. It’s only in more recent years that game publishers have decided to create more games for this demographic outside of the usually casual game.

However, when they are creating these products I don’t know if going the stereotypical route like a barbie video game or this new Your Shape product is the best way to go. Going after a new market with a steretypical product or an idea based on stereotypes is never a good route to gain market share. With the product being made for the Wii. It’ll be interesting to see how Ubisoft integrates Miis and the Internet into this product.

Posted in Advertising | Leave a comment

Helping launch Gamercamp

By Duane Brown | Published: December 26, 2009

Client: Gamercamp

Website: www.gamercamp.ca

Services: Market Research and Strategic Planning & Brainstorming (also execution in sponsorship and advertising of the overall marketing plan)

Company Description
Gamercamp is a new conference that is a great opportunity to connect Toronto’s gaming community (press, media, publisher, developers) on the cusp of Ubisoft opening a Toronto development studio in our world class city. The conference is going to be different from other events as its areas of focus are the history, creativity, and ideas behind video games.

Work
September – December 2009

I was originally brought on this project to help out with market research and make sure that the schedule and conference as a whole resonated with the video game community. This included looking at potential associations to partner with including Interactive Ontario, Hand Eye Society and International Game Developers Association (IGDA) as well as who could the organizers get as speakers for the conference. The Gamercamp organizers had particular criteria and with the help of a website I run, www.GameIndex.ca, we were able to source potential speakers quickly and learn what video game projects they are working on.

As this project and conference grew, my relationship with the organizers grew to the point we were expanding on our working relationship. I was able to leverage my knowledge and background in the video game industry to help with strategic planning & brainstorming to assemble a full marketing plan for the conference. The marketing plan encompassed:

Public Relations:  Including looking at traditional press like The Sun, The Start and National Post and sites including BlogTo, Torontoist and IGN. I also looked at the number of freelance journalists that live and work around the Toronto area and write for both Canadian and US publications.

Sponsorship: Finding sponsors that would fit with the Gamercamp brand was important to the organizers. They also wanted to start a long-term relationship with each sponsor and integrate their brand into the conference. One major sponsor that came on board was Red Bull, which is a perfect fit for this event.

Community Opportunities: Looking to connect with schools and students at local video game programs was an important part of the marketing plan. These were the type of people this conference was going to attract since a few of our speakers were form the independent development community in Toronto.

Advertising: Besides advertising the event to students in the Toronto area. There was also a focus on looking at the other video game companies in Toronto as well members of Interactive Ontario, Hand Eye Society and International Game Developers Association (IGDA). This focus allowed each e-mail to be tailored to each recipient while at the same time allowing for creative freedom. Other opportunities like South by Southwest’s e-mail newsletter were looked at but weren’t feasible with the short time line for this marketing plan.

Connecting the four areas above to form a marketing plan for Gamercamp was going to be the best use of limited time, money and other resources as the event was less then 2 months away when I got involved. It required focusing and firing on more then one cylinder at once, but was achievable with everyone on the same page.

Outcome
Gamercamp was a success as the event was sold out. In fact, when the final numbers were tallied the event was over sold by 20%. Having the community support this great event as well as have Red Bull on board this early was a huge help. A debrief meeting was held recently and talks of launching Gamercamp 2 are in the works for 2010.

Posted in Client(s) & Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Social Media Calendar

By Duane Brown | Published: December 24, 2009

Wed Worker Daily has a great post up today about using a social media calendar to help track and manage your efforts in social media. The author gives a couple examples, including one they use themselves. This a great idea and one I’ll be using a lot more as I head into 2010.

Posted in Social Media | Leave a comment

The Real Time Search of Brittany Murphy

By Duane Brown | Published: December 23, 2009

Over the weekend we heard that Brittany Murphy had died and joined the power couple of deaths this past summer of Michael Jackson & Farrah Fawcett. What’s interesting about the death of Brittany Murphy this past week is that Google has now implement the germ of their idea of real time search.

Real Time Search

Seeing the results for Farrah Fawcett, which usually includes Wikipedia in the top 3 spots is nothing new. You’ll see images and videos from usually YouTube in the tope 5 spots as well. It’s the new feature of a constantly updating Twitter feed that you start to see how Google and other search engines are hopping to bring real time search to the Internet. What this means for consumers and marketers is different but potentially gold:

Consumers
We’ll get to know what the mass market and consumers around the world are thinking about what we are searching for. It could be good or bad but we’ll get to know what our peers think either way. The next level of real time search would be to find a way to include what others in our trusted network think first before that of everyone else. However, just the idea of knowing what the world thinks about any given topic could be very interesting.

Marketers
Marketers are another beast all together. Their goal is going to be how they get their company or product in front of the eyes of consumers while searching online. Paying for Google AdWords may not be enough as real time search starts to take more president in our lives. As marketers, we are going to have to start to figure out how to get our brand in the time line of real time search but that’s not going to be easy. However, there is a silver lining in all of this.

Conclusion
It’s going to force even more company’s to focus on building a better product and not just put anything out there. The battle on the search engine marketing arena is about to take another turn and it’s only going to be for the worst if you build a bad product and experience for your costumers. It’ll be even more interesting to see if up to the minute product reviews and other type of information gets included into real time search.

Posted in Search Engine Marketing | Leave a comment

TinyURL.com in a Print TTC Ad

By Duane Brown | Published: December 20, 2009

I was traveling on the TTC on Tuesday headed out to Yorkdale mall with a friend from out of town. I tend to check out all the ads on the subway and look for new ones. I noticed that an ad for St. Stephen’s Community House, which is a social agency helping people develop skills and back into the work force.

The URL they were using on the ad (www.TInyURL.com/JobConnect) just took people to their homepage. However, I thought it was interesting to see a non-profit use a URL shortner in one of their print ads. Traditionally you wouldn’t see academia & non-profits take such and upswing in the use of “cutting edge” technology. I’d have rather they used Bit.ly so they can tracking the stats of how their ad is doing. Maybe even use different URLs for different prints ads to see which ones are driving traffic to their site. But the fact we are starting to see non-profits harnessing the latest techology to market themselves is great. Check out below for a couple photos I snapped with my BlackBerry.

Job Connect URL Ad

Posted in Marketing | Leave a comment

Facebook does not like Bit.ly URLs in messages

By Duane Brown | Published: December 16, 2009

I remembered a few weeks ago that Mashable mentioned that Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links. I didn’t think much of it as I saw that this was fixed shortly after this post went live and mostly forgot about it until this past week. I was trying to send a few friends a message and used Bit.ly to shorten my URL as it was a rather long one for the message. I hit send and the system just stalled. At first I thought maybe Facebook was acting up and the system was going a little slow as this was weird. I keep trying a few different times and nothing happened.

I left Facebook and came back a few hours later to try again and it happened. That’s when I looked at my message and noticed my Bit.ly link and thought it might be the issue. I switched in the longer URL and pow it was fixed. I could have sworn this was fixed as I searched around profiles of friends and saw that shorten URLs were all working and hyer linked. However, it seems that the issue is still happening when you try to send a message to a friend. Facebook could be doing this as a smap procasion as well but I don’t think that is it. I hope to see this change in the future.

Posted in Search Engine Marketing | Leave a comment