Gamification Stuff we love: World Cup Fun
Major sporting events such as the World Cup, always bring along a whole bunch of fun advertising and marketing campaigns. Being from Belgium originally, sporting success by the national football team is one of the few things that brings all Belgians together (apart from football haters, but let’s keep it positive). Belgium is probably one of the least patriotic countries I know of, probably partly because most of us have an allegiance to the side of Belgium we are from (I am from Antwerp in the Flemish region), before we would ever mention the nation.
In international settings outside Europe, Belgium is often considered part of Brussels, a part of Sweden, the Netherlands and all sorts of geographically interesting locations, but I guess with only 11 million people, there is only so much noise that can be made. Why am I going on about this, well I screamed and shouted at my TV last night to help the Red Devils efforts in beating the rather smug USA, who in their patriotic norms had slated pretty much anything that could possibly have been said about Belgium. There were request to boycott Belgian Waffles, Jean Claude Vandamme, but somehow Belgian beer was left off the hook…I wonder why? But this patriotism thanks to sports is massive for engagement and companies are fully aware of this, so hence this slightly Belgian slanted view on what we can learn from the world cup about engagement and gamification.
World sports brings together a very captive audience and team sports such as Football can motivate a nation to go completely crazy. In Belgium unity is a major issue, yet for the World Cup, the Twitter hash tag #tousensemble #iedereenmee #iedereenduivel are all asking people in both French and Flemish to join together and support the team. In fact the hash tag for each game #belusa for example make it very easy to follow the social stream of commentary. The Belgian post office played into this campaign nicely with a postcard campaign to the Red Devils from children across the country, there are several editions with different players so do check out the other ones, but I thought the hair question was definitely very striking ;-): [video_player type=”embed” width=”640″ height=”360″ align=”center” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”20″]
[/video_player]
A fun item that jumped out as a result of the targeted news stream is a bet between the Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad and the American newspaper the New York Daily News, when the national team of either paper won, they would post a link of the other papers’ front page of that day on their website and social media, sing the national anthem of the other country and drink a dedicated beer from the other country. So today somewhere in New York press people are getting ready to sing the Belgian national anthem (which by the way is in the countries’ three official languages, yes 3, thanks to World Wars we also have a German section in addition to Flemish and French) and they will post it on YouTube. Once it is out I will promise to update this post, but that is a bit of good rivalry fun. And here is the man from The New York Daily News singing his best version of the Brabanconne aka the Belgian National anthem:
[video_player type=”embed” width=”640″ height=”360″ align=”center” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”20″][/video_player]
Companies are trying to engage both locally and globally at the same time. The typical big event contenders are McDonalds, who not only have adds running in various countries that didn’t make it to the group stages to support one of the teams that did. I was in Sweden last week and thanks to McDonalds, Argentinian, Brazilian and German fans got to ask Swedes to get behind their country. As part of the Fifa downloadable app, McDonalds offers prizes for your Fantasy Football team. The Fifa app includes a full game section with predictor type games all relevant and on topic with the chance to win kick-off balls and other related materials, which will have value to the player. Although I liked the aforementioned ad for support, I didn’t see any version for Belgium though… so here it goes join me in supporting Belgium’s national football team also known as the Red Devils (Rode Duivels, Diables Rouges), the smallest nation left in the world cup!!!! #alltogether #iedereenmee #tousensemble
If you have seen me speak at any point this year, then you have also experienced my personal like for dancing. Well Visa had the same idea and launched the Visa Samba campaign and asked a film maker in each country that qualified to create a short clip with representative local dancing. Here is the Belgian entry featuring a saxophone, which was invented by Belgian Albert Sax (just in case you didn’t know)(might have to do a quiz at the end of this blog post to check your knowledge on Belgium): [video_player type=”embed” width=”640″ height=”360″ align=”center” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”20″][/video_player]
Although I personally prefer the following clip for engagement factor, organised by radio stations and other brands to bring the party together: [video_player type=”embed” width=”640″ height=”360″ align=”center” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”20″][/video_player] (Oh and by the way there are sequels to this one on YouTube…)
One fun example of an in person engagement campaign, comes from the sausage and meatball manufacturer Herta. They placed a box in Antwerp Central Station and invited people into to receive a snack box of free meatballs, inside the box a famous football player was challenging you to a mini-game with supporters rounding up outside and a whole media frenzy as if you were the hero of the show. See for yourself:
[video_player type=”embed” width=”640″ height=”360″ align=”center” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”20″][/video_player]
So what can we learn from all of these examples:
- Big sporting events create an easy theme backdrop
- Captive and intrinsically motivated audience of supporters
- All invitations to play and engage were voluntary
- Predictors, fantasy teams and bets to encourage an added bit of competition
- # as a unifier, social stream organiser
Now, will you join me in supporting Belgium for the remainder of this world cup? #iedereenmee
