Stories, games and your brand

Yesterday's panel on stories, games and brands went really well. Delighted with the feedback after the session and lovely to see so many friendly faces in the room. Clickable Culture and Emergency Weblog both liveblogged the session.

Here are some of the questions I asked the panel:

1. Who are you and what do you do? What gives you the right to a free gold pass and what makes you think you can go head-to-head with Zuckerberg?
2. Can you give me an example of of where using interactive games, puzzles and stories really helped a brand and how?
3. You talk about a subset of the digital audience engaging in this way. Do you think it's just the same audience moving from one branded experience to another or are they genuinely unique audiences?
4. Can you give me an example of some of the real train wrecks in this genre? Let's hear about when brands really got it wrong?
5. What will it take to get this type of deeper interactive experience into the mainstream. Is there a relationship to be built between the more popular flash based games and the more extreme ARGs?
6. When I've seen these things are done badly it tends to have been marketeers commissioning these type sof interaction. Traditional marketeers tend not only not familiar with the technology but also lacking in any understanding of the types of audience this type of interaction attracts. How could you go about changing this and educating?
7. Some would say that there's nothing new about brands using puzzles, games and stories. That's why soaps are called soaps, that's why the back of cereal packets still hold enormous fascination for me. So is there really anything new and better about stories, puzzles and games in today's web?
8. Jeremy, you're using Penguin's RnD money to commission these experiences. What type of success would you need to have in order to continue this indefinietly?
9. Is there a humane way to kill an ARG? 
10. Are we snobby about of the types of games and interaction we favour at conferences like this. Flash based games are very popular and can bring in a sizeable audience but there considered a bit web 1.0, a bit CDROM and unfashionable. Do you agree and would you ever recommend to a company or brand to invest in this type of gaming now?
11. In your experience, what are the success criteria by which a company measures this type of activity. Are they genuinely trying to reach a new audience, deepening the engagement with their current audience or trying to associate their brand with the cutting edge. In yesterday's session on What Teens Want one kid told of how he visited Tropicana's site purely to collect the XBox points. He didn't seem to have any positive association or grater level of engagement with Tropicana itself.
12. How brands avoid interaction and engagement feeling like a tokenistic add on.
13. Understandably, this panel has focused on commercial brands useage of games and puzzles to engage an audience. However, do you believe that games can help not-for-profits, educators and educational brands, political organisations and political brands find a way to use games and puzzles to engage audiences with some of the more complex and important issues of the day. Is there a game that can help us solve the problems we face around climate change.
14. Have you ever told a brand not to do this type of thing. Have you ever refused a commission based on the fact that it wasn't write for the brand?
15. So, you guys have built the case that games and puzzles can be used effectively by brands. What brand values or what audiences do you think really want to engage with content at this level and these experiences?

ARGs 1 Zuckerberg 0