Trying to explain to people that I consider board gaming a hobby can be difficult. It seems very common in our society to segment things into those that are for kids and those that are for adults, even when the truth is far more complicated. Graphic novels like Sandman, Watchmen, and Walking Dead struggled to have their complex and adult stories respected by mainstream audiences because comic books are for kids. Outside of the Latino communities, Soccer lags behind other national sports in the US because it has been branded the sport for kids. Video games struggle with the ‘toy for kids’ identity, which has influenced everything from the decency debate in mainstream media to the ability of eSports to be taken seriously as a spectator experience. Similarly, despite a European-driven revolution in board game design towards more interesting and adult-friendly games, most Americans still think of board games as things for kids. But I’m here to tell you that not only have board games made huge strides in playability and strategic depth, but that understanding the parallels between the systems typically present in these games and the field of advertising will make you a better advertiser.
A few weeks ago, while coming home from a game night with my friends, I was thinking about game design, exploring in my mind how setting and theme could inform design and visa versa. I had also spent part of the night chatting with my friends about my career prospects in advertising. When these two thoughts converged, I found myself wondering what kind of board game would you make if you were going to make a game about advertising, in the same way that Monopoly is about wealth aggregation through real estate development, chess is about battlefield tactics, and Settlers of Catan is about colonization. Exploring this space led me to realize that the vagaries of advertising as a discipline share a lot in common with the strategic puzzle of a well-designed board game. It also led me to consider whether game theory had a place at an ad agency. Could understanding how systems behave when all involved parties act with rational self-interest be beneficial when making the hard decisions creative teams face every project? With all this swimming around in my head, I remembered reading a while ago about a project at DDB’s San Francisco office where a UX designer and an account planner teamed up to use the principles of pen-and-paper role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons to provide a template for bettering understanding UX design. If there were parallels between D&D and UX design, why couldn’t there be parallels between this new school of strategic board games and advertising as a discipline?
My favorite style of board game is known as German-style, otherwise known as a Eurogame. Paraphrasing from the Wikipedia page, they are defined by having simple rules, short to medium playing times, and indirect player interaction. They emphasize strategy, downplay luck, lean towards economic rather than military themes, and keep all the players in the game until it ends. They are usually less abstract than chess, but more abstract than war games. Likewise, they generally require more thought and planning than party games, such as Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit, but less than classic strategy games, such as chess and Go. Amongst the most famous titles in this genre are Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, and Agricola. The mechanics of these games share a lot of similarities with advertising, and from these similarities we, as advertisers, can glean information about how to make better ads.
The first, and perhaps most obvious, connection is that both feature a deep and unsolved problem space. When deciding how to tackle a communications strategy, there are always questions of competitor approaches, trends in consumer behavior, media buying, and so on. There is the fine line advertisers walk between break-through messaging that is cutting edge, and making everyone hate your client company. And, of course, there are no answers, only best guesses. That’s what makes the field interesting: it is an unsolved space where each agency is trying their own approaches and best ideas, while watching what everyone else is doing and trying to imitate, without copying, what they do that works. There would be a lot of money in a formula that showed what messaging would work for every brand in every situation, but if it were that simple, advertisers would all be out of a job.
Instead of such a formula, advertisers attack the unsolved problem space in different ways, hunting for the optimum play in a variety of different contexts and settings. This is the same for playing German-style board games. Typically you, as the player, have imperfect information and are forced to use intuition and wits to make a judgment call as to what the best play is on any given turn. For example, in a social dynamics game like The Resistance, each player only knows what they have in their hand, and must rely on the voting mechanism of each round to try and figure out what all the other players are holding. This is very similar to the poker variant Texas Hold ‘Em’s mixture of communal information and secret player information from which each person at the table must try to make the best choices for how to bet, and when to fold, based on what they know, what they can see, and what they can guess from the behavior of the other players.
When it comes to advertising, this kind of thinking is important for account planning. Account planning deals with imperfect information as a given of the profession. Planners want to get to the deeper motivations and cultural trends that are driving consumer behavior in order to help the agency, and the client, create better marketing. However, people aren’t trustworthy. Surveys, in-homes, man-on-the-streets… they all suffer from the fact that people will disguise their true motivations if they are embarrassed by them, whether consciously or subconsciously. Also, people often don’t know what they want until they see it. When asked, the general public always want a faster stagecoach instead of a car, because a car is something that only a limited number of visionary people can understand the value of before it’s made. Given all of this imperfect information, planners have to take their best shot at guiding their creative team towards making the best ads possible.
Another important aspect of German-style board games is resource allocation. In most German-style board games there are a variety of resources at the players’ disposal, and figuring out how to best apply those resources to the tasks of the game is the surest route to victory. In Puerto Rico, for example, you have money that buys buildings and workers, with methods for replenishing both your money and your workers at numerous occasions throughout the game. It is also worth noting that money is very rarely the means for victory in a German-style board game, favoring the appropriately named Victory Points, allowing money to be just a resource that functions as a means to an end. In advertising, money is a tool as well. If you ignore the business side of the agency, and its need to generate profit, what remains is the money budgeted for making the ads. In other words, that money is less of a goal and more of an abstract provided by the client to be used to create something. Narrowly, this could be pieces of advertising such as TV commercials, magazine print ads, highway billboards, or radio jingles. A broader view would be that an agency’s resources are tasked with creating consumer engagement that leads to sales. This then expands the concepts to include branded events, product placements, in-store experiences, and beyond. Money is just one of the primary resources at an agency’s disposal; there is also time and human capital. Knowing how to balance these three interconnected elements leads to better work.
Resources aren’t as simple as they seem, either. Another thing you can pick up from games is just how many different elements can be considered a resource. The easiest way to explain this concept is with Wizards of the Coast’s seminal trading card game: Magic: The Gathering. Magic has one primary resource: mana. Mana comes from land cards and is used to cast all the other cards in the game. However, thinking about the game only in terms of how to make sure you have a steadily growing mana pool is limiting. There are many other resources that are much more subtle. Since you need to have cards in hand in order to play them, cards themselves become a valuable resource. Each player starts with twenty life in a standard game. You only lose the game when your health falls to zero, so, as a player put it to me once, the only life point that matters is the last one. As a result, players can sacrifice life in order to gain advantages elsewhere in the game, like access to more cards, more mana, or a more favorable board state. These are just a few of the alternative resources present in Magic: The Gathering.
So how does this apply to advertising? It is a way to expand the way you think about a problem space. When you get stuck on how to tackle a communications problem, start asking yourself about where you are putting your focus. What are all the different tools at your disposal? What is the role of every element of the communications ecosystem, and how many of them are available for you, as the agency, to control in some way? What are the trade-offs you make when you pick one thing over another? When are approaches you are considering complementary, and when are they competitive or contradictory? I would argue that social media marketing grew out of this kind of thinking, even if people didn’t realize they were doing it. Twitter and Facebook pages for brands started as a simple mouthpiece for companies to interact with the public. Then people realized that this was an untapped resource, and began using it for promotions and contests. Then people started generating content for it, and copywriters started managing posts while art directors curated photos and created art assets, and it soon became just another wing of advertising. Fast forward to now, and social media is a meaningful tool for consumer engagement and a powerful sales engine.
A final key component to the German-style board game is the use of randomization. For the enjoyment of the game, most German-style games create increased replay value by randomizing starting elements of each game so that it is rare for two instances of the game to feel the same. But more important to my argument is the use of dice to randomize elements within the game itself. Random chance can be the death of a game. Chutes and Ladders is not very fun because random chance controls everything. On the other hand, a game in which randomness plays an important role, but one that can be planned around or managed, is a powerful thing. For example, in Settlers of Catan you gain building materials each turn based on a dice roll. However, if you try and hold on to too many of these instead of spending them, and the dice roll comes up seven, you are penalized by being forced to discard. This risk management aspect of many games is another great parallel with advertising. In advertising, there are always a hundred different factors that are difficult to predict, almost all of which have to do with the behavior of the consuming public once they get their hands on the thing you’ve created.
Perhaps your online contest ends with Taylor Swift being sent to play a concert at a school for deaf kids, because online jokesters thought it was funny. Or your tool for the public to make their own car commercials ends with hundreds if not thousands of anti-Chevy ads that mock their ecological damage and recent economic insolvency. Those examples are pretty harsh, but this kind of thing happens all the time. A beautifully crafted user experience turns out to be less intuitive than it seemed when the UX team pitched it. An ad built around a joke killed in focus groups, but when shown to the public it just doesn’t seem to resonate in the same way. As the famous axiom says: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The marketplace is crowded with messaging, so there is extra pressure on advertisers to find a way to break through and grab people’s attentions. This means taking risks with what you say, as well as how you say it, which in turn runs the risk of offending people and ultimately doing more harm than good. These risks aren’t totally random, in the same way that a dice roll only has so many possible outcomes. As a result, clever players, and advertisers, can learn to not only expect the unexpected, but also prepare for the unexpected in a way that mitigates risk. Arguably, this is one of the most important functions of the planning department, as they are responsible for grounding advertising in a human truth, a core aspect of the modern human experience, so that it can survive fickle consumers and society’s shifting trends. If the core strategy is right, the only thing the agency needs to do is come up with new executions to keep the messaging fresh for the audience.
At long last, we have finished exploring the similarities between German-style board games, but there is one more area to look at: how learning to think strategically about these kinds of games allows advertisers to make better choices in their day to day work.
From my experience, there are two schools of strategic thought: FOO and Evolving. FOO stands for First Order Optimal, and it refers to strategies that immediately present themselves as the most effective solution to the problem space when the problem space is new and relatively untested. To give you an example using a simplistic analysis of tennis, i.e. if you and a friend pick up tennis, as total beginners, and your friend figures out that if he serves it hard and to the far side of the court, eight or nine times out of ten he can score an ace on you, that would be a FOO strategy. Evolving strategy is what comes after, if the game has the depth to support iterative strategic refinement. Returning to the tennis example, once you took some time to improve your return game, as well as identifying the exploitable pattern of your friend’s serves, you would be able to hit the ball back. Your friend, rarely ever having to have to face a returned serve, will fumble and fail, netting you the point. If he has the capability to evolve, then he will develop the ability to respond to your return, and maybe even use that counter-hit to find a new way to throw you off your game. And thus, the strategy of the game evolves. If he can’t past his FOO level understanding, he will simply start losing all the time. In general, intelligent and creative people have more breadth than just being FOO or just being Evolving, but they do tend towards being stronger in one category or the other, and those different strengths provide very different, and very necessary, services for the work of an agency.
When the industry is in flux, like when advances in technology shatter the old way of doing things, you want FOO thinkers. FOO thinkers don’t just get you to market first using whatever new technology is making waves, they know how to make sure that when your first offering goes to market, it’s the best thing you can produce with the limited time you have to develop it. This kind of thinking can also be ideal in heavy time crunches. When a client comes looking to make major changes to a campaign, a FOO thinker can get you to the good-enough place when there isn’t time to get to the great/perfect place.
Evolving thinkers aren’t as good in a pinch, are slower to develop their position, but once they do it tends to be richer because it is based on exhaustive research and testing. It works best in environments where uniqueness is more valuable than newness. This is ideal for mature categories like automotive or food, where seemingly everything has been tried at least once with varying levels of success. Since the ultimate goal of the marketer is to stand out from the competition in a positive way, preferably one that drives sales, having the Evolving strategy mindset will unlock the hidden niches, effective counter-plays, and other alternative thinking that only a deep level of understanding can provide. In other words, this thinking excels at finding the white space, whether in media strategy, branding strategy, or creative approach.
The pinnacle of this ability to see the deeper potential in a competitive field is the ability to instigate your own disruptive change, not through technology but through shifting mindsets and changing conventional wisdom. In gaming terms, this is called breaking the metagame. The ultimate subversion by Evolving strategic thinking is to realize you can escape the strategic box in which you think you belong. Bobby Fischer changed the game of chess by showing the world that control of centerboard was the best way to develop your pieces. Obviously, developing such disruptive ideas is extraordinarily rare and difficult, so I can’t provide a template for how to do it. That being said, here are a few areas of thinking I believe can lead to such a breakthrough.
In Jim Collin’s Good to Great, one of the three “hedgehog principles” that turn good companies into great ones is to change the way the company a thinks about its revenue stream. If you are a brick and mortar store, is your goal to increase income per customer visit or income per store? This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but in actuality it can vastly alter the way a business is run. The former would create an in-store experience that focuses on up-selling the customer’s planned purchases and enticing the customer with impulse buys. The later would create an experience that encourages the customer to make frequent repeat visits.
Another, more branding specific example, is to explore how the brand is defined in the market. Sometimes the revolution can come from redefining what your product is, by sliding up or down the category hierarchy, or by leaving it entirely. Your company makes high end, electric motorbikes. Do you set yourself to compete with other motorbike brands, like BMW, Yamaha, or Harley Davidson? Do you compete with personal transport brands, including cars, pick-up trucks, etc., as well as other motorbikes? Or even higher up on the hierarchy, do you position yourself as a transportation company, and take on everything from bicycles to public transit? Maybe you narrow focus. No one really owns the electric motorbike space, though some have tried, so maybe that’s where you position the brand. Or maybe you try something radical, like positioning yourself as an environmentalist brand and ignore the transportation super-category entirely.
Finally, such disruptive change can be found in how you play the game. It’s important to remember that advertising always has competition. Sometimes it is obvious, like Coke and Pepsi. Sometimes it is less obvious, like how Planned Parenthood and the Nature Conservatory are actually competing over the same pool of charitable giving. Even new products that burst forth and define new categories must still compete with the inertia of the status quo. In terms of board games, there are times in which you play the board and there are times in which you play the other player. In advertising, the board represents the consumers and the other players represent your market competitors. There are times in which playing the board and ignoring the competition is really effective, like Coke’s Happiness campaign. There are times in which playing the players is the best approach, like Dove subtly going after other beauty products with their Real Beauty campaign, or Taco Bell not so subtly going after McDonalds with their Ronald McDonald spot.
Where you are in relation to your competitors is always key, as well. If you lead the market, then playing the board is often the best approach. Why draw attention to the competition? For everyone else, however, a more adversarial game is key. In games, there are often two dominant strategies: the current “best” strategy and the strategy designed to counter that best strategy. This is not a perfect example, but to explore this idea in advertising we can look at the male deodorant category. Brands like Degree, Speed Stick, and Dove for Men have all seen that the post college market is the largest market for men’s deodorant; there are more adult males than teenage males and there are more years of consumption from twenty two onward than from fourteen to twenty one. Each has a different niche they fill, like sports oriented or comfort oriented, but they all fit the “best” super-strategy of targeting adult males. Axe, Lynx, and their ilk have gone after teenagers because it is a market not well served by their competitors, and they use the allure of sex as their primary driving factor. This would be the counter-strategy that finds a strong way to differentiate itself while subtly attacking the competition; the overt sexuality of Axe has the added benefit of making the adult brands feel staid and boring by contrast. Real disruption comes from the third option: the alternative win condition. I would argue this is what Old Spice did. Born from their desire to shake off their image as “Dad’s Deodorant,” and all the negatives that come with that, they made a campaign that was funny, sexy, and memorable in all the right ways. It was goofy and fun in a way that appealed to all ages. It was sexual in a way that appealed to teenager boys wanting to attract girls, while staying classy enough to appeal to adult men who aspire to stay attractive as well. It also did this in a way that wasn’t offensive to the primary purchasers: their moms, girlfriends, or wives, depending on the age segment of the demographic.
Remember, these disruptive changes aren’t a dime a dozen and the older and more stable the system, the less likely there will be such tectonic shifts. A game like Ticket to Ride, which is ten years old, is more likely to see a massive change in strategic play than chess, which is more than a thousand years old. Similarly, it is important to remember that FOO isn’t bad for being shallow; it’s great for under pressure situations and adapting quickly to disruptive change. Evolving strategy isn’t bad for being slow, either; it’s great for taking the work of FOO thinkers and elevating it to the next level; iterating its concepts towards an ever more refined product. The important thing is that understanding the systems behind great board games can give you insight into how to make great advertising. Understanding the need to prepare for the random and unexpected, knowing how to properly allocate your resources, knowing how to expand the way you think about what your resources are… these tools will help guide you in making good decisions about designing a marketing message and, if you’re lucky, turn your work into a real game changer.