Hot topic of the month: gamification. It’s the use of game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. If you’re a trendy suit you’re probably all over the branding implications of this.

Gabe Zichermann invented the term and he spoke at the Facebook In-Depth conference. (Video below; he’s good talent). He compares old loyalty marketing systems to the Facebook social gaming model. “Engagement at the top drives loyalty and revenue at the bottom”.

Quote: Some Farmville players are paying $15,000 a month for the privilege of playing the game. Never limit the upper amount of money someone can pay you.

Stick with it; starts getting interesting about 4 minutes in.

Gamification – The New Loyalty from Gamification Co on Vimeo.

The New York Times on Dunhill Ties, Bang You’re It and Catch a Choo.

Australia doesn’t got talent. America doesn’t got talent. Scotland’s got talent.

Also, it’s a quality piece of video production with choreography that recalls some of Abba’s finest moments. Our man David Fare wears a kilt. I’ve said enough.

And where she stops, nobody knows. The expression comes from the American radio and TV show, The Original Amateur Hour. Which ran for half an hour incidentally.

Anyway, vaguely à propos of that, here’s a great use of metaphor to tell the brand story. It’s an online competition run for Volkswagen in Norway.

And by the way, where do I get a car like that? Done by Norwegian agency TRY, with the digital legwork by their partner APT.

Via Advertfan.

From the isitchristmas.com web site.

The opera was terrible but the stage rocked.

In 1946 an Austrian town so small it didn’t have a concert hall hosted an arts festival. They built a stage on the most beautiful part of town; the lake. Now they attract a quarter of a million visitors annually and sell 98% of tickets.

Here’s their web site, in case you think they only have one stage.

State of the art advertising at that time:

Nothing like a beer and a smoke. TWO kinds of beer; life was good. Newspaper, TV and magazine advertising were powering along.

Price Waterhouse Coopers release the Entertainment and Media Outlook report on August 3rd. It points to strong growth in Internet, Subscription TV, Out of Home (OOH) and radio. As you know, we have industry leading offerings in three of the four areas. Just sayin’.

Photo is from the Documenter blog. Lots of interesting old pics of Perth there.

In April Ad Age ran the 2011 Digital Advertising conference; lots of the content is still online. We thought you might be interested in the Opening Keynote. John Riccitello, the CEO of Electronic Arts (EA) spruiks gaming as a mass advertising medium. EA serve 15 million hours of game play every day to the ‘leaning forward’ audience and their reach exceeds cable shows most days. He acknowledges it’s early days and he makes a good point at the end about opportunities for ads in online gaming.

YOU BET YOUR SWEET OLD FASHIONED SEXIST ATTITUDE IT IS!

Source.

We continue to pursue a client interested in a large scale 3D Projection Mapping project. Around 60,000 people attended Liverpool’s On The Waterfront event produced by our new best friends The Macula. Some righteous dude calculated an economic benefit of over $1.5M.

Here, the re-developed Perth waterfront would be an obvious project. If you have a client interested in participating, let’s get together and pitch it to the City.

Re-development is 3 years away. In the meantime, you can do some pretty neat stuff on normal buildings. Indiana Tea House at Cottesloe Beach?

What’s with the skinny video?

A provocative ad about cultural identity.

For all those people who talk down big projects.