InGamer’s Mission:
To make the live events
people watch more fun
The point of this post is
to articulate that underlying philosophy of InGamer; how we view the content
landscape and how we are positioning ourselves today to capitalize on the
future as we see it.
So…we want to make live
events more fun (starting with Sports). That is a basic statement masked in complexity. We are focused
on real-time events and those who are watching them. Our product is being
designed with that core target user in mind.
InGamer is focused on
making the experience of watching live events within this modern multi-screen
ecosystem more FUN.
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Head-Up experiences
The main goal of InGamer is
to create an experience to attract & engage the casual sports fan. Casual
sports fans WATCH sports. Not every sport and not every game, but they watch
some games. And audiences do not
inherently want to be focused on other screens DURING the action – it’s the
breaks in play that we aim to engage around…while allowing more hardcore users
the opportunity to dive more deeply into the InGamer world.
We want fans to play
InGamer ‘some times’. That is an important point – we do not expect
people to play every game. If you only watch Monday Night
Football each week, or Packers games, or Habs/Leafs games, then our goal is to
spark InGamer play during those events.
Just because we don’t
expect users to play every game, doesn’t mean we don’t want to acquire millions
of users. There are 10's of thousands of live sporting events...stretched
out across every day of the year...so there are ample opportunities to engage.
‘Fantasy’ – typically – is a weekly activity during singular seasons, with
30-odd opportunities to really engage per year, thus engaging users EVERY time
is the key to value. InGamer has 10,000s of potential engagement points.
We are making sports gaming
more accessible, more flexible and more inherently social…thus raising the
engagement ceiling of live events
InGamer is a social game
influenced by fantasy sports.
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The Modern Audience
The other MAJOR
philosophical aspect of InGamer that needs to be discussed is how we plan on
taking advantage of the new multiscreen ecosystem that is evolving: best
described by this oft-quoted stat - 86% of live sports watchers engage
in a companion device at some point during their watching experience.
Before discussing how our
InGamer approach fits into this shifting engagement paradigm, It’s useful to
explore what decisions others are making.
SO…almost everyone watching
sports shifts their attention from the main-screen to a secondary one during
events. Great! That means they will automatically be more inclined to
participate in an activity broadcasters tell them to participate in during the
telecasts. Broadcasters know audiences are already using their
phones/tablets/computers, so when they produce content/activities for those
screens, and they promote that people can do it simultaneously with broadcast,
the audience will surely engage with it. Right? I don't think so....
Audiences are multi-taskers
not because they have to be, or are told to be, but because they want to be.
Social network usage has
effectively conditioned audiences to aim for instant gratification. The a-d-d audience now has the tools to be engaged and entertained
whenever they chose. Boredom & passive watching is a thing of the past.
Audiences can engage with whatever
they want whenever they want to.
The fact that audiences are
engaged in multiple screens during live events doesn’t mean that they are more
inclined to just ‘DO’ something because it exists. If you build it, you
can’t ‘make‘ them come. Facebook and Twitter have 100s of millions of
users. It has taken time building their audience (a freakishly short period of
time in the relation to past “things’). But one of the core tenets of their
successes is that they don’t force users to do anything, They are social. Come
and go as you please.
Single live event based gaming built with the psychological
dynamics of fantasy sports has the potential of being the most valuable bridge
between live sports and the multi-tasking CASUAL sports fan audience
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InGamer gives audiences
something else to do while they are watching sports without forcing them to
change how they watch.
InGamer
is “smart man’s” Fantasy built for the newbie.
We have built the easiest way for the uninitiated to get a taste of what has
become a major phenomenon. And new fans can do that at any point of a season,
or even any point of an individual game. InGamer is the ultimate Fantasy
appetizer!
And for hardcore players, the
deeper you think about InGamer, the more strategic it can become…but anyone can
play InGamer by simply clicking 2 buttons.
