Imagine an advert that:

- You don’t have to place
- Lasts for five, six, even seven minutes at a time
- Your customers will watch by choice
- Your audience can interact with, rather than passively watch

It sounds like a fantasy, unless you’re talking about an advergame. Our 2009 advergame for Cancer Research has had over 36 years worth of direct interaction between supporters and the brand. Are you sure about placing that ad now? Let me tell you more….

We all know that with traditional advertising, it can be difficult to hold consumers’ attention. A typical TV spot gives you around thirty seconds to make an impression and print ads have to make their point almost immediately.

With an advergame however, you can hold a person’s attention for a theoretically indefinite amount of time. Advertising stops being a passive exercise when you give your customers something to engage with, allowing you to build customer loyalty through positive emotional attachment.

For example, our “Escape to Plastic Beach” game for the Gorillaz has an average playtime of around 8.5 minutes. That’s the equivalent of seventeen TV commercials, and the whole time the player is swimming in branded elements – sometimes literally.

Advergames can also reach places that traditional advertising can’t easily get to. An advergame has the same world of mouth element that a TV commercial or a print ad have, and it’s much more portable. Social networks like Facebook and Netlog have made sharing content easier than ever before, and this allows your brand to reach its audience without having to pay for a choice billboard or a prime slot on the television. If your game is good enough, people will come to you, rather than you having to go to them.

This portability doesn’t come at the expense of reach either, because an advergame can accumulate millions of plays. The game we made for Lily Allen, “Escape the Fear”, has been played nearly six million times since December 2008. The fact that we’re talking about a game that came out more than a year ago also neatly illustrates the third point, that advergames have a much longer shelf life than traditional advertising. A well made game will continue to attract players on a much longer timeline than a print advert, and will remain current much longer than a TV commercial.

Let it Flow 36 million users and counting...

With so much of the word now online, advergames are the smart way of reaching your audience in a way that they will remember and talk about. And if you want to talk about return on investment for advergaming vs. traditional advertising? Advergaming is in a different league.

You know who to call. Jeff.

Lily's "Escape The Fear" advergame: 37+ years of airtime

Far be it from me to blow Matmi’s own trumpet (!!), but when I saw Lily Allen pick up an Ivor Novello award for “Most Performed Song” last night, I though “You betcha!!”.

I don’t know how they work out the stats for something like that. What I do know is that in terms of direct impact, the advergame we wrote to promote the single, “The Fear”, has been one of our most successful ever. It includes a free play of the most performed song and accounts for over 37 years worth of airtime.

37 years of airtime. And counting….. . For less than the cost of a half page ad in the Times.

If there was an advertising industry award for “Most Return on Investment” I think we’d put the entire industry in the shade. We’ve moved the goal posts. Some big brands and some savvy digital marketers already know that, but they’re in the minority. Come and join us. Branded entertainment is the new black.

You know who to call. Enjoy, Jeff.

On Sunday night at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, the stars of the silver screen gathered to hand out awards at the 82^nd Oscars ceremony.  Award shows don’t really get much bigger than the Oscars, but I must admit that I don’t really tend to pay attention to them, and they tend to just slip me by.

Not this year though.  This year, I was pretty well up on who had won what and who was going away empty handed – or at least how many awards Avatar didn’t win – and this piqued my interest enough that I looked up the information I didn’t already know.

So what was different? (more…)

This a concept video of how a tablet version of the Chrome OS might work. Obviously, it’s still early days for the OS, and the design looks a little spartan, but it’s clear that multi-tasking is something that Google is investigating.

What’s more interesting to me though, is the timing of this video. An upsurge in interest over tablet devices is hardly surprising in the wake of the iPad, but after Steve Jobs’s pop at Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy, to release a video that clearly highlights one of the deficiencies in the iPad seems more than just coincidence.

Google is one of the few companies that has the funding and brand recognition to stand against Apple, and like Apple, knows that refining an existing technology can be just as – if not more effective – than developing a new one.

With Apple playing the canary in the tablet race, Google may be able to avoid many of the problems that arise when breaking new ground.  It wasn’t the first MP3 player that was the definitive one, and it won’t necessarily be the first tablet either.

Dagfinn Bach, a Norwegian developer who worked on the very first MP3 player in 1993, is currently working on the successor to the humble MP3, which he calls MusicDNA.  A MusicDNA file will contain not just the song, but could also contain lyrics, videos and blog posts, all of which is dynamically updateable. It’s strange to think that we make one day look at MP3s with the same wistful regard we have for eight-tracks or the seven-inch – ignoring for a moment that at least some part of the storehouse of affection we have for physical storage media is its quality of sound – but time marches on, and it would appear that a more interconnected musical experience is in store for us in the future.

I have to admit, this appeals to the part of me that wishes ‘the future’ – and yes, I do mean a nebulous collection of futurism and sci-fi nerdery – would hurry up and arrive already; but at the same time, I can see how this might prompt concerns that the relationship that young people have with music is being irrevocably altered.  The kind of peripheral content that MusicDNA would include has always been part of being a music fan, but by including it with the song itself, it ceases to be an organic process of accumulation, and becomes just another media channel.  On the other hand, if end users could make MusicDNA files, it would be an amazing avenue for sharing user-generated content and for new bands to make their presence felt.

However, MusicDNA means that the amount of content needed to get an album together – provided that the concept of the album survives – suddenly shoots up.  This is unlikely to be a problem for artists on big labels, although as yet, no major label has signed up to MusicDNA, but for the aforementioned new band, it requires a significant amount of extra work.  Bach is quoting up to 32GB of extra content on MusicDNA files – although I’d assume that it isn’t actually on the file itself, not unless that’s some particularly impressive compression – but when your first single can hold all the content on your band website hundreds of times over, that first single might suddenly seem very daunting.

It’s refreshing to see however, that at least someone is looking forward rather than back when it comes to music, even if it’s a Norwegian computer engineer.

When the bassist for Duran Duran, a band that has sold over 100 million records during its career, starts to talk about the music industry, you can assume that he speaks with a certain amount of authority and with a certain amount of experience.  In a speech that he gave at the University of California to mark the 40^th anniversary of the first message sent via the internet, he talked about how the internet was stifling new talent and having an adverse effect on music.

While I have the utmost respect for Mr. Taylor’s years of experience in the industry, I can’t help but come to a different conclusion than him when it comes to the influence of the internet on music.  Taylor talks about his youth saying, “I hated being a teenager, until I discovered just how powerful music was.  It helped me find an identity and find myself.”

It’s a familiar story to many, and it’s certainly one that I identify with, despite the twenty-year gap in age between Taylor and myself.  Taylor speaks of his experience with Roxy Music and seeing them on the television in 1972 and how that experience captivated him:  “The way they looked and sounded stunned me, and a generation of mes,” he said.  “But we had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube.  The only way I could get close to that experience was to own the song … I had to go on a quest of sorts to get it, but my need was such that I did it.”

A familiar story, but it’s one that is familiar because it’s old, a dinosaur of a story in fact.  That’s not to say it isn’t valid one, of course, and it’s going to have resonance with a lot of people, but all the same, it’s a story whose time has past.  Taylor is well-aware of this of course, as his comment about Roxy Music was prefaced with:  “The speed and growth of new technology, which has been so heralded and so much fuss has been made of, has actually served to disguise how little real growth is taking place at the artistic level.”

Now this is where I part ways with Mr Taylor, because, with no disrespect meant to Mr Taylor, or to his band, but his attitudes represents the way the music industry was and not the way it is. What Mr Taylor calls the “various backwaters of older music,” is, to me, just a different avenue for growth.  Older and more obscure music is much more freely available now, and so rather than have every rock band cite Zeppelin or Sabbath as their inspiration, you can find bands inspired by music from countries that they’ve never been to, or by genres that died out long before they were born.

Taylor is looking at our always-on, always-connected society as someone who didn’t grow up with it, and if you’re an outsider looking in, it’s can be a fairly daunting place.  But for those who grew up in it, it seems entirely normal, and what Taylor sees as the dilution of creativity and durability by the likes of Twitter and Youtube, is just part of everyday life to today’s teens.

Taylor admits that he is still buying that first Roxy Music album, but also says that had he had discovered the band now and been able to watch that fateful TV clip over again online, as well as access all kinds of other content about the band “the bubble of [his] obsession would have burst a long, long time ago,” which raises the question of whether or not the limited exposure to content was actually beneficial to music as a whole, or simply insulated and artificially inflated the life span of bands, groups and artists.

Monster Pinball won the Gold Award for Best Mobile/Handheld Game at the Rose Design Awards in Nottingham on Friday. Monster Pinball is the first foray into mobile gaming for Matmi New Media, who is best known for its viral advergames and is by far the most advanced pinball game available for the iPhone.

Monster Pinball fought off stiff competition to take the top accolade in the newly created gaming section of the awards. The award comes just as a new version of Monster Pinball, with rebalanced gameplay, improved sound and Facebook Connect functionality is set to hit the App Store.

Described by Touch Arcade as “A Beautiful Pinball Experience”, Monster Pinball was Apple’s Pick of the Week less than a month after its release, as well as receiving top marks from Mac World and Appvee.com and Pocket Gamer’s gold award.

A winning shot.

The news that Adobe are bringing flash to the iPhone – albeit indirectly – isn’t exactly new, but as both a flash developer and an iPhone developer, we certainly have a unique perspective on the matter.

First, a little bit of background; Adobe has announced that the upcoming Flash CS5 will allow developers to export their work as native iPhone apps, which can then be submitted to Apple for approval.  This isn’t some nebulous goal that Adobe is aiming for either; several apps have already been approved by Apple and are available for purchase on the app store.

So we know it works, and we’ve tried out one of the apps – We here at Matmi grabbed Chroma Circuit and gave it a play, and it seemed to work pretty well – and all we’re left with is the question of ‘now what?’

We’d pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we weren’t going to be using Flash on the iPhone.  Sure, we were annoyed at first, but we’re nothing if not adaptable, and the success of Monster Pinball is a testament to that.  However, this does present us with some interesting possibilities as we still do a lot of work in Flash and an opportunity to get that work to a wider audience, like the millions of people with an iPhone or iPod Touch, is an exciting prospect.

But you’ve got to imagine that plenty of other developers have had the same idea, and that’s what worries us the most, that the market will be flooded with low-quality apps and finding anything decent will be like finding a needle in a haystack.  The flash apps will still have to go through Apple first of course, but our other concern is that the influx will cause approval to grind to almost a complete standstill with the sheer volume of apps to be looked at.

But on the other hand, there are plenty of flash developers who are doing some very impressive work.  Games like the charming Scary Girl or the hypnotic Auditorium deserve to be seen by as many people as possible, and this is an opportunity for such developers to reach an audience that might never otherwise have seen their games.

It’s an exciting time to be a flash developer and it’s an exciting time to be an iPhone developer too.