Draw Something App Incorporating Brands into the Gaming Experience
Popular social drawing app, Draw Something, was bought by Zynga for $180 million in March after seeing rapid growth in the user base. Draw Something lets players pick from one of three words to draw and have their opponent guess, and now advertisers can have their branded term be one of the options. There has been recent online chatter about Draw Something incorporating brand sponsored words into game play selections.
The NHL was one of the first advertisers to buy hockey-related terms, like puck, Zamboni, hat trick and slap shot. They encouraged players to share their drawings with the #DrawNHL hashtag on Twitter and also posted user created drawings on a Pinterest board.
Draw Something is known for incorporating pop-culture terms, like Lady Gaga, “Hunger Games,” and LeBron into the game, which users responded well to. The app began testing the new ad product with recognizable brands, such as KFC, Nike, and Doritos. The ad platform is a more seamless inclusion of branding than typical in-app advertising.
The important thing to learn from brand engagements within Draw Something is the seamless process for users to experience the game. Users have the option to draw the branded term or choose a different option if they do not like the brand. Draw Something has created an environment where players spend time drawing the branded images, and then want to share their masterpiece on their social networks without directly thinking of it as an advertisement.
Conversation Buzz for
Draw Something
Brand-Sponsored Words
Facebook:
- Draw Something has 1,677,876 Likes on Facebook
– 123,913 people talking about the page this week
- There was no official mention of adding brand-sponsored words on the Facebook page, and posts by Zynga mostly consist of user drawings
Twitter:
- @OMGPop is the official Twitter page (link on the Draw Something website is to @OMGPop)
– 23,537 followers of the page
@OMGPop has a Klout score of 60 (brand average of 20), indicating a high level of influence amongst followers and extended network
*Thanks to Rebecca May for writing this
