Congratulations. Your Ad Was Fun. What Was the Brand Again?

Imagine I give you 90 seconds to race a virtual shopping trolley through a supermarket.

You avoid exploding tomatoes.

You collect golden avocados.

You accidentally drive through the bakery.

You score 8,450 points.

You are delighted.

Then I ask one question:

Which brand made the game?

Silence.

You remember the avocado.

This is the slightly awkward problem with playvertising.

I am using playvertising here as a broad term for advertising that asks people to play rather than simply watch: branded games, advergames, playable ads, interactive challenges and other forms of gamified brand communication.

The logic sounds almost suspiciously perfect.

People avoid advertising.

People like games.

Therefore, make the advertising a game.

Marketing has once again discovered algebra.

Except there is a missing variable.

Did anybody remember the brand?

Attention is not the same thing as memory

One of advertising's favourite modern habits is confusing activity with effectiveness.

Someone clicked.

Someone played.

Someone spent 73 seconds interacting with the experience.

Someone even shared it.

The dashboard is glowing.

Everyone may go home.

But there is an uncomfortable distinction between remembering an experience and remembering who created that experience.

Research into advergames makes this particularly interesting.

A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Advertising, looking across 38 datasets, found that consumers generally had more positive attitudes toward advergames than toward other forms of advertising.

Good news.

The same analysis found that brand and product information was actually less likely to be remembered through an advergame than through other advertising formats.

Less convenient news.

The games could still be persuasive and influence choice behaviour. But the simple assumption that more engagement automatically produces more brand memory does not hold.

Which gives us a useful distinction:

An ad can be memorable without making the brand memorable.

That should probably be written above a few creative department doors.

The avocado has stolen your media budget

Games are cognitively greedy.

When you watch an ordinary advertisement, the advertisement gets most of the available stage.

When you play something, your brain suddenly has employment.

Where do I move?

What do I click?

What happens if I touch that?

Why is this tomato attacking me?

How do I get another life?

Your attention is being divided between understanding the rules, controlling the experience, solving the problem and enjoying yourself.

The brand is competing with its own entertainment.

Studies of advergames have repeatedly found that variables such as game speed, cognitive demand, brand prominence and game involvement can change how well people remember the sponsoring brand.

One study found lower brand attention, recognition and recall when gameplay placed greater cognitive demands on players.

Another found slower games could produce better brand recall than faster ones under certain conditions.

This makes intuitive sense.

If I am desperately trying not to die, I may have limited cognitive capacity available to admire your logo.

The irony is wonderful.

The game can become so good at being a game that it becomes worse at being advertising.

The brand cannot just attend the party

There is another clue in the research.

Brand memory tends to improve when there is stronger congruity between the game and the brand, and when the brand is meaningfully integrated into what the player is doing.

This is the part marketers should pay attention to.

Putting a logo in the corner is not integration.

That is sponsorship with buttons.

If a coffee company creates a racing game and simply places coffee cups beside the racetrack, the brand is scenery.

If the game revolves around keeping a city awake by delivering increasingly complicated coffee orders before sunrise, now the product has entered the logic of the experience.

The difference is structural.

The brand should be the verb, not the wallpaper.

That may be the most useful rule for playvertising.

Nike should make you move.

LEGO should make you build.

Spotify should make you discover.

IKEA should probably make you spend three hours assembling something before realizing one screw is missing.

The mechanic itself should express something recognizable about the product, category, brand personality or customer experience.

Otherwise the entertainment and the advertiser become two separate memories.

Guess which one is more likely to survive.

But isn't the point simply to get people engaged?

Sometimes, yes.

This is where the anti-gamification argument can become too simplistic.

Brand recall is not the only useful advertising outcome.

The same meta-analysis that raises questions about memory also found that advergames can positively affect persuasion and choice behaviour.

Other research has found that specific combinations of brand integration, game rules, autonomy and brand-game congruence can strengthen attention and memory.

A 2021 study also found that characteristics including platform and game speed could affect delayed memory, not merely what someone remembers immediately after playing.

So the sensible answer is not:

"Games don't work."

Nor is it:

"People spent four minutes playing with our logo, therefore Cannes Lions should begin engraving immediately."

It is that playvertising is highly execution-dependent.

The mechanic matters.

The cognitive load matters.

The relationship between brand and game matters.

The prominence of the brand matters.

Even the device and speed of play can matter.

There is no magical Engagement Fairy sprinkling brand equity over everything containing a leaderboard.

So, is playvertising worth it?

It can be.

But I would use it when the act of playing can communicate something that a normal advertisement cannot communicate as effectively.

That is a much higher bar than games are fun.

Playvertising makes particular sense when participation itself has strategic value.

Maybe people need to experience how a product works.

Maybe the brand has a behaviour it wants audiences to perform.

Maybe exploration is central to the proposition.

Maybe there is a genuinely entertaining mechanic that naturally dramatizes a product benefit.

Maybe repeat interaction is more valuable than a single exposure.

In those situations, play can move the audience from being a spectator to becoming a participant.

And participation has possibilities that a 15-second video simply does not.

But if the game could be reskinned overnight for Pepsi, Adidas, Samsung, an insurance company and a regional bank without fundamentally changing how it works, there is probably a problem.

You have created entertainment inventory.

Not necessarily brand communication.

We may also be measuring the wrong thing

This is where I would become suspicious of the standard campaign report.

Total players.

Average session duration.

Completion rate.

Interactions.

Shares.

Lovely.

Now hide the logo and ask the participants who made it.

Suddenly the meeting becomes more interesting.

If I were evaluating a serious playvertising investment, I would want to know not merely whether people played but whether they correctly attributed the experience to the brand.

That means looking at things like:

• -Unaided brand recall after playing
• -Brand recognition
• -Recall after 24 hours or several days
• -Association with the intended product benefit
• -Changes in consideration or preference
• -Performance against a simpler advertising control

Otherwise we risk spending considerably more money to create something that generates considerably more interaction while communicating considerably less.

Which would be impressive, in its own way.

The best game is not necessarily the best ad

Creative teams naturally want to make the experience enjoyable.

They should.

Nobody has ever demanded less enjoyable advertising.

But advertising has an additional job that games do not.

It has to leave something behind.

A distinctive association.

A product truth.

A feeling attached to a particular name.

A behaviour.

A reason to choose.

A memory that belongs to somebody.

That means there is a productive tension inside playvertising.

Make the branding too aggressive and the game starts feeling like an advertisement wearing a novelty hat.

Make the game too independent and people may happily play it without encoding much about the advertiser.

Somewhere between those two failures is the useful territory.

The brand is present, but not interrupting.

The product is embedded, but not lecturing.

The entertainment earns attention while the mechanic quietly teaches the player what the brand wants to mean.

That is much harder than adding points to an advertisement.

Which is precisely why it can be valuable when somebody gets it right.

Playvertising is not interesting because people remember playing.

The real achievement is when, a week later, they remember who they were playing with.