The Rise of The Women Online Gamers!
Despite the fact they represent 64 per cent of the online gaming community according to Nielsen Entertainment and have enormous buying power, women have long been considered a “silent majority” by the electronic entertainment industry, which has failed to give them their due attention.
The new Canadian advergame Mr. Reach: In the Mouth of Mystery — as well as similar female-directed initiatives from the U.S. and U.K. — is aiming to change that. And early numbers suggest the effort is paying off.
Chrysler’s Sebring Semantics (sebringsemantics.com), for instance, attracted more than 50,000 players in its first month of operation. The female-focused site features a timed word jumble and intermittently delivered sedan information, and engages visitors for an average 22 minutes.
Reach’s romance-tinged game (reachmystery.ca), which involves the use of dental products to clean archeological artifacts, saw nearly 30,000 people register to play in the first three weeks, with 84 per cent identifying themselves as adult women. The average playing time is 18.5 minutes.
“I’m about to open a bottle of champagne,” enthuses Victoria Cruz, who as Johnson & Johnson’s group marketing director of women’s health commissioned In the Mouth of Mystery.
“When you put something on TV, you get 15 seconds, 30 seconds, and it’s in a very isolated and distracting environment,” says Cruz. “Here, consumers are one-on-one with your brand for much longer. So for me, it’s mission accomplished.”
That mission, however, was at one time dangerously close to never getting started.
“(My colleagues) were like, ‘Women playing games? Are you crazy?’” recalls Cruz. “It took a bit of persuasion but I think they came to understand it wasn’t an out-of-whack strategy but rather one based on consumer insights and research.”
According to Sean MacPhedran, director of creative strategies for Fuel Industries, changing the collective mindset remains an enormous challenge.
“Even though the research has been there for a long time… it’s not intuitive. It’s not an obvious thing to say, ‘Let’s build a game for women,’” explains MacPhedran, whose Ottawa company has designed advergames for HBO, Family Guy, Sprite, Gap, General Motors and Best Buy, to name a few.
“Advertisers are only just now realizing there’s a huge audience for these (female-targeted) games, and a huge demand for them.”
Tags:gaming community, online games, women gamersTags: Online Games
