Addicted to Escape: The Dangers of the Multi-Billion Dollar Video Game Industry

This week we discussed several subjects, but the one I am choosing to post on relates to video games and how they have expanded with internet and social technology.  I don't have anything against video games, I used to play them occasionally as a child, but as I've gotten older I've found that it was never a priority to begin with and thus doesn't deserve the time, money, or energy that I don't have just to "connect" with other gamers.  The video game industry currently valued at well above 68 billion dollars a year globally.  That's billion with a B.  That's more money generate by video game sales than the movie and music industries combined.  There's a reason that it's so successful, it's because it can be addictive.  Take a look at the statistics below, a few of which I will highlight afterwards:

(Click link below to enlarge)

 

Via.

There were a few facts I found alarming.  Remember, this infographic is from 2009, and the industry has only grown year over year.  The average age of all gamers is 34 years old.  I am 30 years old now and I only assumed that playing video games was supposed to decrease the older you got.  Does this mean I might pick them up later on?  Will I be buying games when I am 39 years old?  I suppose generationally it makes sense, for the first time the average adult grew up with access to video games in the home for their entire lives and now they can play them to connect with their children.

Another fact I found particularly distressing is that the average gamer spends 8 hours a week play video games!  That is likely in addition to unbelievable 35 hours a week they spend watching television! That's nearly 2 days a week spent in front of a screen with your mind being held hostage.  What has become of our culture that this is acceptable behavior?  Why are these games so important to us?  Is real life so dreadful that we need to set aside two days a week to escape it?  

The last fact above that I find surprising are the percentage of parents (64%) that believe video games are a positive part of their children's lives.  67% ( approximately 210,313,000 people) of US households are playing video games...which means that 64% of those, well over a million people, find it fitting for their children to play games.  

Here is why I have to question that:

Boy, 13, held on charges he killed cousin, 16, over Xbox

Lil Snupe Murder Suspect Accused of Killing Rapper Over a Video Game

Anthony Maldonado, 9, stabbed to death over 

video game while visiting family in Harlem

Teen Arrested For Killing Brother Over ‘Flappy Bird’ Game

O Snodaigh's son stabbed 'in row over video game

And these were only the first few articles on the first page.  There are literally hundreds and hundreds of instances where adolescents (and several adults as well) were driven to violence over a video game confrontation.  I don't have the answer to why because I frankly don't understand it.  What is the obsession with these fantasy worlds that we build ourselves?  We know they aren't real and yet we allow ourselves to be affected by them beyond rationality.  I think that most things are acceptable in moderation.  And I do believe that there are positive benefits to game play, especially when you are forced to challenge your mind, but the compulsion and addiction scares me and I think it should worry other people as well.  It's important to be self aware, and hey...why not go outside every once in while?

Introducing our GOMC Partner: Upstage Resume!

Team Snapshot and Upstage Resume

Have you ever walked into an interview with a boring resume? Are you looking for a way to stand out from the competition when applying for a new job? Upstage Resume is here to help! With a variety of customized templates, Upstage Resume will help transform your resume from bland to beautiful.


As part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge, Team Snapshot will be promoting Upstage Resume through an online paid search campaign. Below Team Snapshot provides background on the organization, its mission and products, a competitive analysis and a technical analysis. This information will be used to allow Team Snapshot to help grow Upstage Resume's business.

Background

Alysha Watson was updating her resume three months ago when she became inspired to show off both personality and creativity through the design of her resume.  She realized that her document hadn't changed much in the last 5 years besides minor formatting changes. Lauren, who eventually became Alysha’s business partner, was a graphic designer that Alysha collaborated with to create her updated resume. The design was created to catch the eye of a potential employer, with a finished product that included a headshot and graph used to display Alysha’s skills in a visual way instaed of basic bullet points.  Alysha received nothing but positive feedback on her new resume and found that a lot of her peers and friends were interested in having her help redesign their resumes. Alysha and Lauren began working on a website that would allow consumers to send in a basic Word document resume and select a template from over 20 designs for their new resume. The site launched on April 1, 2014 and because Alysha and Lauren both have full time jobs, they are fulfilling orders as they come in during their spare time.  

To quote Alysha on her new company: “Upstage Resume's vision is to enhance the traditional resume with color, creativity and design. We want to help the every-day person "outshine the competition" with a resume that is unique and one of a kind.”

We (the members of Team Snapshot) chose Upstage Resume for the Google Online Marketing Challenge because they are a brand new company that has great potential for success. Because of their easy-to-use website and creative resume designs available, Upstage Resume taps into a currently un-pursued niche market. Upstage Resume is currently using basic marketing tools , which leaves a lot of ways Team Snapshot can help grow the business (they use Shopify to track click through rates and page views but have not pursued any further advertisements besides their pages on social media profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter).  

Mission & Products: What the company seeks to do and how it does this through its product offerings.

Upstage Resume’s mission is to provide a product that will help their customers, primarily job seekers, stand out from their competition by providing customized resumes and cover letters that look and read very differently than typical boilerplate resumes.   By enhancing their customer’s current resume through creativity and design, Upstage Resume delivers a product that is a more distinctive and eye-catching deviation from the normal tool of job seekers alike.

Upstage offers 15 different resume templates as well as custom resume and cover letter design. They also offer upgrades and revisions should your resume change or require editing.  Upstage Resume commits to a 72 hour turnaround on resume deliveries, but offers expedited service for a premium.   Upstage does not edit the content of their customer’s resumes, choosing to focus their business on design. 

Competitive Analysis: What other companies out there could be substitutes, or offer similar services?

There are a lot of options out there as far as receiving some sort of assistance with writing your resume or creating a resume that is aesthetically pleasing.  Upstage has determined that their two biggest competitors are Loft Resumes and Resume Launch. 

Loft Resumes is very similar in that they take a basic structured word processing document and translate it into something that matches form with function.  With that being said, Upstage’s costs are far lower and their designs are uniquely designed.  Loft has a lot of options to choose from, but the costs average $99, which is considerably higher than the $35 charged by Upstage.  Their website is also very similar looking to Upstage’s, but a person looking for a job might not always be able to rationalize the cost.

Resume Launch serves a different client base than Upstage Resume.  Again, they offer unique resume product designs that translate boring structure into beautiful resumes but their designs are less interesting than those offered by Upstage. We suspect that a lot of their revenue is driven by their resume assistance offering, which is manned by one person (implying that turn around on purchases is either slow or not top of the line).  Based on reading their twitter account, they are constantly looking to broaden their resume template offerings, advertising new templates on almost a weekly basis.  This will make them more competitive going forward and might force Upstage, new to the market, to consider ways to differentiate themselves.  Their costs are also lower for templates at $25.  

Technical Abilities: how is Upstage Resume utilizing technology?

Upstage Resume is an entirely web-based service organization. Because its products are purchased, paid for and distributed via the website, Internet technology is a core functionality requirement. If the organization forgets to pay its web hosting fees, the website would go dark and there would be limited opportunity for the business.

Upstage Resume relies completely on social media and word of mouth to spread awareness. They are currently utilizing a website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter page, Google+ account and LinkedIn profile. Due to their recent launch, they do not have a large following yet on any of these sites. Their Facebook account has the largest audience, which consists of 305 “likes” for their page. One of their current strategies is too communicate flash sales and special offers via their social media sites. Because of the importance of an online audience going to these sites, one of Team Snapshot’s goals will be to increase social media site traffic.

There are a number of suggestions Team Snapshot has put together regarding Upstage Resume’s social media sites. First, because sales and special offers are only listed on sites like Facebook and Twitter, including direct links to these pages should be obvious on the company’s landing page. A site user currently has to scroll down below the fold to find links to these pages, and there is no call to action or benefits callout on why a user would want to follow Upstage Resume on social media. Second, it makes sense to have an Internet presence on multiple social media sites; however, defining what each will be used for is important.  A critical aspect of social media for businesses is defining the purpose of that social media account. Should all social media sites be used to communicate special offers, or just a few? What type of audience is each social media site trying to attract and what does that actual audience look like? How can we incorporate analytical sites like Google Analytics or other platforms to gain insight into who is actually going to these sites?

All of these points will be addressed in how Team Snapshot helps Upstage Resume grow its business in the Google Online Marketing Challenge.

Thanks For Sharing: Oliver Luckett and the New World Order of Celebrity Advertising

In the midst of trying to come up with something write about this week, I came across an article in Yahoo News titled, "It's All in the Share, and the Buzz." by Eric Pfeiffer.  The article discusses a man named Oliver Luckett who has become incredibly successful for branding and shaping public perceptions of celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg, large companies such as Ford Motors, and even President Obama.  He does this by creating original content that is heavy on "buzz" and the likelihood of going viral.

Oliver Luckett in theAudience's Hollywood Headquarters (via.)

Luckett began his foray into development of media specifically designed for an online audience in 2008 after selling his company DigiSynd to Disney.  From there, he launched his new company theAudience with Napster and Facebook's Sean Parker and William Morris Endeavor's Ari Emanuel.  The purpose of the company is to build an online presence for their clients while also shaping people's perceptions.  Luckett sees the internet as the only necessary medium in building and crafting brand awareness.  It doesn't have to be as expensive as television and the results are frequently more quickly realized.

Let me break down a couple of examples:

• Perhaps the most famous example of theAudience's work is an EDM song by a duo called The Chainsmokers, who quite literally utilized the power of social media to gain a following and subsequently a major label contract after the release of their song, "#SELFIE".  

               

            I personally find the song to be terrible, but does shamelessly find a method of relating to the youth generation's inherent narcissism or vanity, as well as their desire to connect with one another.   The "word" selfie is so heavily used in our society's everyday vernacular that Webster's Dictionary actually added it to it's list of words in 2013.  Not only are "selfies" incredibly popular with today's youth, but many of the "selfies" used in the videos are licensed through real teenage "social media celebrities".  Two examples are Acacia Brinley (1.2 million followers on Instagram) and Nash Grier (6.5 million Vine followers).  I have no idea who these people are, but with such a large audience, it was not long before the video went viral.  It currently sits at over 64 million views on YouTube.

             EDM music plus social media celebrities plus use of hashtags and the word "selfie", it all seems far too obvious, but it worked.  It certainly doesn't make our youth look very intelligent, it makes them look predictable.  

• The second example is a commercial that was created by Ford Motors and released a couple of weeks ago.  If you'll recall, Cadillac released a commercial during the Super Bowl that received a great deal of criticism for "extolling the values of American consumer culture."  As a reference, here is that commercial:

              As you can see, the commercial presumes that Americans work harder than the rest of the world and that as a result, we're better and we deserve better.  There are a lot of ways the tone and dialogue might be deemed offensive, but in response Luckett and his team chose to leech off of the video's infamy and create a response for Ford Motors:

                     The clip features Detroit activist Pashon Murray speaking proudly of the good that hardworking Americans do.  She makes note that we are not all material driven, entitled blowhards.  She leaves the viewer feeling good about themselves, that they should hold their head up high because we are American and that means we want to make the world a better place.  The video currently has over a million views on YouTube and was published on March 26th.  Those aren't astronomical numbers but they are still impressive.  

It's easy to recognize that clear dichotomy between the two campaigns, but that is because they are specifically designed with different audiences in mind (the firm's namesake was not chosen hastily).  Luckett and his team recognize the power of "sharability" and the changing landscape of advertising.  A lot of the power of theAudience is driven by the company's access to a vast network of celebrity supporters.   Ford was responsible for the commercial itself, but they needed help reaching viewers which is where Luckett came in.  He granted them access to a number of vast celebrity networks that agreed to share the video on their social media accounts.  If you think that's impressive, imagine the impact theAudience had during the most recent presidential campaign.

Luckett was hired to manage over 60 Facebook pages for Barack Obama and his initiatives and was able to reach 261 million people a week with original content designed specifically for President Obama.  The power his company is able to wield, especially in this age of instant fame and celebrity worship is perhaps unmatched.  I'm not sure if it's fair or manipulative exploitation, but I'm very curious where this methodology will go next and who else will hop on board.  What are your thoughts?  Is the age of television advertising dead?  What do you think the key to successful viral marketing?  

Sources:

Yahoo News

Cream Global

Tech Crunch 

TWITTER AND THE NEW UNCERTAIN WORLD OF DIGITAL ADVERTISING

TWITTER AND THE NEW, UNCERTAIN WORLD OF DIGITAL ADVERTISING

Greetings to everyone enrolled in MKT 595,

This is my first blog post with regards to this course, but it is certainly not my first foray into the world of blogging.  In the past I have created blogs that discussed comedy and music (I'd post the URLs but the information is so dated, I think it would only serve to embarrass me.  Do you remember when Susan Boyle was a new thing?  You do?  Well kudos to you! Do you remember when The Big Bang Theory was funny?  I don't!)

Anyway, to kick things off I figured I'd discuss something I'm incredibly curious about which is the effectiveness of advertising on Twitter or more specifically how Twitter generates revenue.  My little brother was recently offered a job at the popular - newly public - tech firm in a sales position.  He and his team would be charged with persuading companies to purchase promoted tweets that would be targeted at relevant Twitter users.

Twitter currently has around 645,750,000 users, with an average number of 58 million tweets per day.  That means that the average person should be tweeting about 11 times each day.  Unfortunately this is far from reality.  In fact, about 40% of Twitter accounts (258,300,000) do not tweet anything at all.  This does not necessarily mean that the accounts are dormant, but they very well could be.

Some other statistics I found quite interesting:

• About .5% of the Twitter users attract 50% of attention on the channel
• 71% of daily tweets attract no reaction
• 25% of Twitter users have 0 followers
• Approximately only 8% of Americans use Twitter

There are several other tidbits that you can find in the links below, but the point is that I am not able to reconcile that astronomical valuation of $18 billion that Twitter received when it went public in November.  Apparently neither can Scott Galloway, professor at NYU's Stern School of Business.  Last week at the Ad Age Digital Conference, Galloway claims that while Twitter is currently trading at $44 a share, it is much closer to $10 a share:

“We believe it’s vastly overvalued and that the love affair with Twitter is about to come to an end,” Galloway said, speaking on behalf of the L2 Think Tank. “If you look at the number of advertisers advertising on each platform, LinkedIn actually has more advertisers than Twitter.”

LinkedIn also has a more diverse revenue stream than Twitter, which is completely reliant on advertisers.

Galloway also predicted that, in the midst of the social media bonanza that is currently our Internet, businesses are going to give some sites the shaft, and Twitter will be among those. Only time will tell if Galloway is right, but even if he isn’t, press like this has been known to cause stocks to drop. And since he’s an MBA professor of Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing, so there’s probably something to what he says.

“Your clients are sort of done playing in traffic trying to spread their peanut butter across eight or nine different platforms. I think you’re going to see a consolidation like, ‘These are the two platforms we’re going to invest in, and everybody else is going to be left out in the cold,’” he said.

Galloway thinks that the platforms that businesses will invest in will be Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Sad times for Twitter, Foursquare, Pinterest, Tumblr and the like.

(Via.)

It is important to remember that this is just the opinion of one man.  Last week was not a good one for Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn (stock prices fell -5.4%, -8.8%, and -13% respectively).  Galloway does make a solid point, the biggest dilemma firms face with their advertising budget is clear metrics indicating a return on their investment, namely which avenues to use and how to determine whether they have been effective.  While Facebook advertising revenue last year was 127% that of Twitter's, Twitter's click rate was significantly higher than Facebook's, this according to a report generated by Resolution Media.  Twitter also commanded a far more expensive cost per click.  

I am still a little bit torn on what conclusions should be drawn from all of this information.  Of course I advised my brother to do as much research as possible and follow his instincts, but is it really worth moving to another city for a one-year contract for a company that hands out far more questions than answers?  I enjoy Twitter quite a bit.  I definitely take advantage of corporate promotions, but I mainly use the channel to follow comedians and the news.  The businesses that I do follow employ their own social media strategists so they really have little need to pay Twitter themselves.  While a tweet like anything else put forth on the internet has the ability to live on forever, the greater likelihood is that it will get lost in a sea of words, meanderings, and musings.  

I am curious to hear other's thoughts though, so please feel free to comment below.  Do you think Twitter is an effective advertising strategy?  Do you think the company is valued accurately?  Do you use Twitter?  What do you use it for?  Thanks for stopping by!

Sources:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472

http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-stocks-facebook-linkedin-twitter-2014-4

http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2014/04/07/tweet-no-more-twitter-may-be-10-a-share/

http://thesocialskinny.com/99-new-social-media-stats-for-2012/

http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/

http://www.informationweek.com/software/social/twitter-beats-facebook-on-ad-returns/d/d-id/1204246 

http://resolutionmedia.com/us/white-papers/resolution-media-social-trends-report/