NEWS ANALYSIS: ITEM

			Game Zone: Corporations Create Immersive Content to Build Brand Relationships
			John Blossom
			10 July 2006
SUMMARY:			We've been seeing multimedia content posted on corporate Web sites for years but few of these have the curb appeal and careful focus of Boeing's sites for its next-generation airliners. With seductive music and well-crafted interactive features, Boeing has created an experience that is more like a video gamer's alternate world than an online slide show. In doing so the bar has been raised for both corporations and publishers to consider how the Web can provide direct and immersive experiences that can sway opinion makers with both facts and feelings.

A news headline on the aerospace industry caught my eye recently and it sent me off to the Web to do a little research on Boeing's revamping of its commercial airliners. While entries from Wikipedia were in the hunt for my attention in Google results the top entry was a Boeing multimedia Web site outlining the key characteristics of their revamped 747 design. The site is packed with absorbing presentations on the plane's various features and configurations as well as its key benefits for buyers and a pitch for it being a responsible product that reduces fuel consumption and lowers noise near airports. Thrumming in the background is a seductive trance music track that stays with you as you move from window to window on your PC. Glide over key navigation elements on the site and the cursor triggers little sounds reminiscent of a video game's controls. This is stickiness that invites you to stay immersed in the experience the way a gamer would stay stuck in their own electronic fantasies.

It is, in other words, everything that advertisers would like to get out of print advertising - and more. While much is made out of the continuing value of splashy print ads to engage an audience in a visceral and lingering way, corporations have learned to develop their own online collateral that is destination content in its own right and that's powerful enough to engage a general audience again and again. It's content that's strong on appeal but also strong on information: audiences want to learn about products online and corporations are helping them to do so not just with brochureware but via immersive experiences.

Corporate Web sites in general have become  one of the key destinations for professionals looking for business information according to Shore's own research. But in experiences such as Boeing's presentation and the increasingly engaging content from other major corporations this new generation of online corporate publisher is doing more than putting out the facts. They are instead moving beyond mere information to create on-demand experiences that allow them to have far more time and leverage to influence and build relationships with their audiences than they could get through traditional media channels. Advertising can channel audiences to these experiences, but increasingly it's about getting users to pay attention to the corporation's own entertaining content as much as putting down a marker to get attention in the middle of a publisher's content.

While experiments with corporate content have been going on for several years now the Boeing site seems to have taken this concept to a much higher level of refinement. Here are a few ideas as to what such sophisticated online collateral means for publishers and producers of corporate content:

• It's as much about the relationship as it is about entertainment.  There has been quite a bit of experimentation in recent years by corporations to engage consumers with online content such as small movies used as product placements in captive general entertainment. These are powerful experiments in their own right but they are not designed to engage audiences over a long period of time: they are as disposable as much as the next piece of mass media entertainment  more than they are trying to engage users who want to learn about a company or its products. The Boeing site suggests that corporations can focus on their products as the entertainment and to provide an environment that encourages exploration, using the metaphor of electronic games that allow users to move through alternative worlds in a very personal manner. Compare the Boeing approach to the comparable site for the competition's Airbus 380, which is attractive and informative in its own right but is hardly immersive.
• It's about being able to change your relationship in a heartbeat.  Because of the crash of one of its smaller planes in Russia the home page for Airbus has been reconfigured in recent days to offer just two choices for viewing: information on the crash, including data on the plane, or entry into its normal commercial site. When corporations shift from seductive product advertising to situational advertising though media channels, it generally comes off as highly defensive and somewhat insincere. Ad channels aren't well designed to maintain crisis-driven relationships. With the Web it's possible to offer audiences situational engagement as an option to product engagement at the drop of a hat - and not compromise the integrity of either approach in the process. Instead of having to push messaging through media channels at audiences who may not be receptive based on current circumstances corporate Web sites offer the ability to meet the audiences at the right level of demand and intensity in a relationship as circumstances require.
• It's about establishing relationships through the channels that audiences trust. It's no accident that my search on Google brought me to the Boeing corporate site first and foremost: corporate sites place high in product-oriented search results in general and well-designed ones even more so. Publishers are reluctant to work with open Web search engines for any number of reasons, yet if they fail to get relevant content well placed in these channels the incentive for advertisers to bypass media outlets in favor of building relationships directly with audiences via their own engaging content only increases. By even weaker contrast, try most any enterprise subscription aggregation service. In showing mixed allegiances to search engines ad-driven publications are only increasing the likelihood that their content will not be on the short list of "go to" sites for learning about businesses.

While Boeing's 747-8 site may not play the most pivotal role in its marketing strategy at a B2B level the site's ability to project both image and substance in a very engaging venue offers Boeing a way to project product image to interested audiences of all kinds in a way that traditional media outlets cannot match. In an international war of ideas such communications channels may be worth far more to reaching opinion leaders than a bucket full of display ads. For corporations and publishers alike managing these new game zones will be crucial to their mutual successes for years to come.

- John Blossom

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