Michael’s Right. But Offers Shouldn’t = SPAM
There’s a lot of hullabaloo around the somewhat nefarious practices social gaming platforms use to generate the huge revenue numbers some of them boast.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has led this exposé, and I have to agree with him that mainstream media has somewhat missed it in lauding these hyper-growth companies with acclaim before digging a little deeper into how they’re achieving this success.
I actually take issue less with how these offers trick people — since half the web shows us ads like this — but more with the fact that they’re really, really irrelevant offers. And, that with all the rich data social networks collect about what we actually might like, there’s a giant opportunity missed here for both consumers and advertisers alike to derive far more value. I recently wrote in Mediapost about how social media ads could leverage these data to not suck as much, and there’s really no reason why social gaming platforms can’t show us offers that have something to do with our preferences. I suspect Facebook & MySpace are closely guarding a lot of these data, so that’s part of the problem, but there needs to be some evolution of advertisers to being integrating what data they do have access to about users because this ’spray and pray’ (or more aptly, spray and prey) approach is not sustainable.
I’m all for offers to people playing free games. And offers that might cost them a lot of money. But folks, let’s make them offers that we don’t need to trick them into buying…we’re not that far off from this.
I’ll leave you with an anecdote: I recently bought 2 tickets to DEVO from Livenation because I saw an ad on Facebook that they’re coming to New York and playing their whole “Are We Not Men…” and “Freedom Of Choice” albums. Brilliant! That ad taught me something I didn’t know, and that I cared about, all because it was able to match up my preferences with a relevant offer.