Advertising & Marketing

How Games Can Engage Users and Impact Real Business Objectives

At The Nerdery, we are technology agnostic, meaning that we do not advocate for a particular platform or technology.  Instead, we begin by researching and defining user goals and business goals and then determine the platform or technology solution.  If the goals are to track user performance or change behaviors, consider using games as a vehicle for change.

Some may ask, “Don’t games just waste time?  How do games actually help with my business objectives?”  Consider the engagement users experience with challenges, achieving goals, advancing to higher levels, and learning new skills. These are all desirable objectives for business.

Gallup reported that 70% of workers are not engaged in their jobs, which costs businesses billions of dollars every year, so finding new ways to engage people is even more important than ever. Read more

Tips & Tricks: Creating Efficiencies For Your Development Projects

As referenced in Episode #7 of the NerdCast, “Launching Successful Agency-Partner Projects Under Pressure”, our guests discussed a lot of things that can be done when partnering with a development company to help projects go a lot smoother. These are efficiencies that can directly impact projects on tight deadlines. Below are tips and tricks that can be employed by anybody that is engaging a development partner like The Nerdery.

Highlight Reel:

• Developing a partnership versus a vendor-client relationship. This allows for building new process and workflow dynamics. Partnerships are built on trust and working around one another’s processes. Vendor-client relationships have a tendency to suffer from a lack of communication or a lack of understanding of the creative and development process on both sides of the fence.

Read more

Food for Thought: Agencies & Tech Innovators Need to Get on the Same Page

AdAge has a thought-provoking piece about how agencies & tech innovators need to get on the same page.

Some of it feels a little link-baity. For instance, “Great marketing is a multi-layered, long-term, tech-enabled creative process that spans multiple touch points. Great tech innovation is focused on producing the next ‘billion-dollar single-trick platform pony.’” While a lot of the post seems to blame the problems of conversion and ROI on the flakiness of the quick-moving tech world and not at all on the inability of marketers and advertisers to quickly adapt, it’s still an interesting read. It’s good to see what the other half are thinking.

How Funny Advertising Lowers Our Guard

Forbes has a post about a Dutch study that shows how funny advertising lowers our guard. The study found, “As expected, those students who were primed to be resistant tended to perceive the brands as having more negative connotations … unless that is, the brands were accompanied by distracting text, be that humorous or neutral. The distracting text appeared to interfere with the automatic processes that usually underlie our resistance to aggressive marketing. Separately from nullifying resistance, positive text (humorous or not) led to the brands acquiring positive connotations.”

Read more about it on Forbes.

How to paint 150-foot tall Batman

This one combines two of things we love best, Batman and Advertising. Over at Tor Books they have a great post about How to paint a 150-foot tall Batman. The painting is a recreation of The Dark Knight Rises poster, and as Irene Gallo the post’s author points out the New York City wall is, “one of the only places where advertising is still painted. . .”

Nerdery Partners LBVD’s website is Communication Arts’ Web Pick of the Day

Mad props go out to Nerdery Partner Lawler Ballard Van Durand (LBVD) whose new website was chosen by Communication Arts as today’s Web Pick.

The site was built using WordPress and HTML. If you want to get the inside scoop on this project & LBVD’s objectives, take a look at the Project Case Study. The site was also featured on Cool Home Pages.

Watch out boys, she’ll chew you up

Have you seen Google’s latest ad for Google docs? It features Hall & Oates and is hilarious.

Props from ±rad32 on Mythbusters: The Explosive Exhibition Official Website

Like Matt, aka @the_nerdery, said “How could we say no to ±rad32 when they asked us to help develop a site for the MythBusters,” especially when they wrote such nice things about us:

“So in true MythBuster spirit, we did our homework to make sure we could pull off the experiment. Just as the MythBusters turn to professional explosives experts, academics and stunt people for help, when it came to developers, we turned to the best in the business—the Nerdery. Together, we put on our safety goggles and jumped in with both feet, immersing ourselves in the wild, wacky world of Adam, Jamie, Kari, Grant and Tory and their adventures in debunking popular myths in the name of science.”

Read the entire post to learn more about the project and get links to see the official website.

Super Chatter’s findings: Madonna won the Super Bowl

Colle+McVoy’s Super Chatter is my favorite post-Super Bowl place to go. Instead of having to wade through all kinds of pundits weighing in on the sexiest and most-sexist commercials, you just get to go right to the people and see what they thought. At least the people on Twitter (and do the others really matter?).

It seems the Halftime show garnered the most social media interest, even more than the game — even in the nail-biting ast minutes. Of all the great little pieces of trivia served up at Super Chatter, the best piece is that only 4% of people used the official hashtag #SB46.

The inside scoop on ‘Think Different’

If you have a little time (and tolerance for clunky writing) go read Forbes’ The real story behind Apple’s ‘Think Different campaign. The piece is written by Rob Siltanen who was the creative director & managing partner at TBWA/Chiat/Day. He not only pitched ‘Think Different,” but also wrote the rough draft of the script that became the iconic commercial.

“When the ‘Think Different’ campaign launched, Apple immediately felt the boost despite having no significant new products. Within 12 months, Apple’s stock price tripled.”