Marketing to Gamers: Getting A Gaming Degree |

Marketing to Gamers: Getting A Gaming Degree

JP Sherman

Some would call me a skeptic. They’d be right. Now, I’m not the kind of curmudgeony skeptic that debunks things for its own sake, I’m the kind of skeptic that takes ideas, pares them down to likely candidates, then lets the math do the talking for me.

When it comes to video game degrees, there are some interesting arguments. Detractors say that the credentials students earn from these vocational colleges are degree mills at best, scams at their worst. From the vocational education’s point of view, these programs give people the core information they need without what they call “clutter” – philosophy, literature, phys ed, then they send the student out into the job market with the core competencies under their belt to pursue a career in something they love. I’m not here to make that judgment. I want to take a look at the campaigns they use to sign students up.

Marketing Degrees to Gamers

The above image shows 2 young men, despite their slightly grotesquely 3-D/ 8 bit heads, they could be around their early to mid 20’s. However, the target audience is men in their mid to late 20’s to mid 30’s. They’re not targeting 18-19 year olds. They’re not targeting women, they’re looking for current to post community college male graduates, or people who tried college but cut out a bit early and who have experience enough of the job grind to be looking for something new… it’s a subtle semantic difference that they capture in this image. I don’t have any evidence to support this other than the fact that the guy on the left has either a beard, a 7 o’clock shadow where the color is distinctly different (grey) than the color of his hair.

The 8-bit imagery doesn’t really have a lot of relevance to gamers under the age of 25. 16 bit games came onto the market with the 4th generation consoles around 1987, which would make the minimum age (assuming they were gaming at 5 years old) 27 years old to have any real emotional or nostalgic connection with 8 bit games. With that bit of information, that seems to support my “25-35 yr old male” theory. These types of media campaigns use a simple funnel strategy:

1: Buy Media on Targeted Sites

2: Run 2-4 Ad Variations

3: Measure

4: Optimize

5: Relaunch

Their costs per aquisition can be very generous, since a conversion means a hell of a lot of money.

The problem with these campaigns is that they tend to take a shotgun approach, albeit a well aimed shotgun blast. The link sends you to a page where you put in your personal information and then you get emailed information and called by a professional career consultant (sales guy). These ads do very little to capture and utilize the behaviors inherent to us. This media strategy is the same, whether they’re selling movie tickets, cars or t-shirts. I think that gamers, as a subculture, have a different shared experience, we have different expectations & we have different online behavioral pathways that create additional nuances when marketing to us.

They do a good job, and they have the right idea with their A/B testing: Ad 1 & Ad 2. In my experience, this campaign works & works fairly well. However, one of the goals of marketing is to maximize the ROI by optimizing the cost per acquisition. How could Fullsail’s campaign engage the gaming audience in such a way that the audience would spread the ad for them. Would it make sense for them to create their ads to become a part of the content experience as opposed to “just an ad”. Have they done any testing that would have supported the research that says that for gamers, ads are a part of the content?

The core difference that Full Sail & other vocational colleges that are marketing video game degrees is that they’re NOT marketing to gamers. To do so would be disingenuous & off the mark. They’re marketing to male education seekers between 25-35 who play games. The difference is primarily semantic, but what Full Sail’s done is made those selections through the design of the ads. Gamers wont really be compelled to learn more. Education seekers who play video games will be compelled. This “intention based pre-selection” increases the number of people who are more willing to actually sign up and take these classes.

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