Hacia una tipología de advergaming y formatos afines

Zusammenfassung

As a result of the digitalization of traditional media and the fragmentation of audiences, advertising formats undergo a process of deep transformations in which they seek to find an answer to the increasing problems in achieving target�s attention. Advertising saturation and channel diversification have contributed to deepen the need to change the way advertisers and agencies communicate. In that overpopulated digital landscape the capacity to attract does not depend so much on the message, but on communication, ie., on the relation between user and brand. Hence, content is becoming increasingly relevant, and advertising campaigns put more their emphasis in raising innovative forms that involve added value for users. It is that context that, at least partially, helps to explain the growing importance of below-the-line non conventional strategies, formats and media. The idea of attractive advertisiments that come together with a specific interest for users and that pose a fluid natural communicative link with them (that is, an idea of advertising close to that of content) find a conductive horizon in digital media. In that search for new formats, the importance of game logic in digital environment cannot be neglected. This paper is aimed at delimiting the concept of advergaming as a point of confluence for three relevant streams in digital media: First, the development of advertising formats focused on fun and entertainment �advertainment (Ramos, 2006)-; second, the development of the so called �serious games� �i.e., games with other purposes beyond the recreational ones, like edugaming and edutraining-; and third, the trend of exporting the logic of game to enhance process or functions originally not related to gaming �the so called �gammification�-. The most known form of advergaming �the encounter between videogames and advertisingconstitute a platform where recreation and digital media capacities fruitfully meet. Their origin 3 dates back to 1976 (Grundy, 2009), but they are not to be recognized as an advertising format until 2000 by Anthony Giallourakis (Clemente y Abuín, 2009; Méndiz, 2010:42; Selva, 2009: 148). The explosion of language, media and formats in the Internet contributed to make that phenomenon more complicated, but also richer. Despite its consolidation as a functional advertising strategy in recent years; advergaming remains a territory of ambiguity, being easy to find different concepts, mutations, cases and experiments related to its nature. The rapid changes that characterize digital media undoubtedly help to increase confusion. On the basis of analysis of advergaming related concepts, this paper poses a catalogue of defining characteristics for that advertising genre, as well as a set of differentiating categories in relation to other similar commercial or persuasive communicative genres. The idea is to set out a taxonomy of advergaming related media genres, so that the approach to advergaming from different functional dimensions allows to bring light to its strengths in answering advertising saturation. In the end, the doubt whether we are dealing with a very advertising strategy or rather with a communicate strategy that goes beyond pure commercial or persuasive limits remains.