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Dumb Idea: Cinema Advergames

According to a press release by National CineMedia, ‘advergames’ might be coming to a cinema near you soon:

Brand Experience Lab’s AudienceGame is a kind of “advergame” which is played by theatre audiences moving together to act as a “human joystick” to control the gaming elements on the big screen. Brand Experience Lab has designed and produced custom cinema AudienceGames for clients including MSNBC.com in the USA and for Volvo in UK, receiving international acclaim and generating up to 70% unaided recall with audiences.

This is clearly one of the most idiotic ideas I have heard so far this year. Have you ever met somebody who said they went to the cinema to play games with the other people in the audience? Does anybody want to play ‘human joystick’ with the annoying teenagers in the back row?

Apparently somebody thinks so:

“Marketers continue to seek innovative and entertaining ways to interact with their customers, and the movie theater is the perfect … environment for brands to take advantage of new technologies …,” Cliff Marks, National CineMedia’s sales and marketing chief, said in a statement.

If this guy really thinks so, he must be seriously out of touch with movie goers. I’m sure the recall rates for these ‘advergames’ are huge, but I doubt they will be anything but hugely negative.

Now, National CineMedia is not a small company, they are responsible for First Look, the Lobby Entertainment Network and provide advertising for the likes of AMC, Cinemark, and Regal. Given its reach, chances are you might become part of a human joystick game sooner or later…

Clearly, this is yet another example of a company not considering its customers – the moment I see this happen at my local theatre, I’m out of there.

I definitely am not a fan of the teenagers in the back row, or the drunk people at the moives… but I wouldn’t mind trying the human joystick… but I’m reminded of “Matinee” with john goodman (http://imdb.com/title/tt0107529/) where the movie theatre seats was rigged to poke people and stuff in queue with on screen happenings… that’s not what i want the movie theatre to become.

Frederic:

Thanks for your POV about AudienceGames and I hope that you’ve done some research into what’s been done to form your opinion. We actually spent almost 3 months testing it here in the US with audiences before we began the discussions about a larger installation and found that people were, in fact, very enthusiastic about playing AudienceGames in the movie theater. It plays very well to the social nature of going to a movie theater. We did a fairly large number of exit interviews to gauge how people felt about playing games and we ran over a 90% acceptance rate. And, if you’ve seen any of the videos around of people playing the game, you can hear the positive reaction to the experience. That being said, we understand like any other form of entertainment, we understand that we will have to continue creating highly engaging entertainment for the audience to continue to want to play. At the Brand Experience Lab we’ve worked with many emerging technologies over the years and I can assure you that we use an “audience first” to everything we develop.

Thanks again for your POV.

David Polinchock
Chief Experience Officer
Brand Experience Lab

David, thanks for your feedback and yes, I did my research.

Maybe I’m just not the kind of audience you are looking for. I really don’t want to be social in a movie theater. I go there for the movie and nothing else.