Advertainment & Advergames Defined

As everyone in-the-know…knows… there is a panoply of jargon available in the marketing and advertising vernacular war-chest…so to speak. Did you have a bit of trouble making sense of that sentence? Good…because it just goes to show that, often, the more jargon (and/or other complicated words) that you use…the more complicated things become. However, there are a few terms that I believe are worthy of addition to any Marketer or Advertiser’s verbal repertoire. These are Advertainment, and Advergames. The marketing concept, customer relationship marketing, one-to-one marketing…what is it all about? It is about building relationships, hopefully for life, it is about getting a captive audience to show an active interest in your company and its offerings, it is about connecting to people on a person-by-person basis rather than by trying to hit everyone as a single, mass audience. So…word-of-mouth, viral marketing, guerilla marketing...what are these all about? These are about generating interest through (usually) non-traditional media means, these are about generating enough interest in a company, or a company’s message, that the audience may even seek out information about the company on their own, rather than having the message thrown at them along with the other 3,000 brand messages that they receive daily, and often ignore. So where do all of these terms converge, what is a cost-effective way to reach a large audience that includes numerous active participants? Advertainment. Advergames. These usually internet-based forms of marketing are a genius answer to the marketer’s dilemma.

But what are they? You won’t yet find a concise definition for these on Webster’s or in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but you will find their definitions on the traditional encyclopedia’s Web 2.0 counterpart, though often cited as being less credible due to its mainly user-generated content, Wikipedia is more widely used today than any of its traditional predecessors. Wikipedia gives great definitions for both terms. It defines Advertainment as “a marketing method which distributes an advertising (commercial) message via an entertainment content or format [which has] a main objective of transforming advertising into something attractive and desirable instead of just interrupting people to sell something in 30 seconds.” This definition drives home the main points of this obscure, new-age means of reaching people. Wikipedia describes Advergaming as “the practice of using video games to advertise a product, organization or viewpoint.”

These two forms of marketing are to be the main focus of this blog, so please stay tuned, as I plan to further define and analyze these two enigmatic fields as much as possible.