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Jesse Shannon is the president of the premiere interactive marketing agency, SAJE Media. As a corporate citizen, he busted his chops in the dynamic world of video game production gaining working experience in Activision's Los Angeles and Tokyo offices. His most recent work as an employee was contracting with Honda on their ASIMO humanoid robot project spreading the good word on the coming personal robotics industry to the world (and Disneyland).

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Rolling Out a Gamer-Friendly Shopping Cart

Written on
May 5th 2006
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by Jesse Shannon  |
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Sitting in the “Advertising in Games” panel discussion at last month’s OMMA conference really got me thinking about the untapped potentials our “interactive marketing” industry is still failing to recognize in this hugely expanding, insanely fertile medium best known as videogames. But it was one moment towards the end of the discussion, which summed the conversation up well.

An audience member asked quite simply, “What are we defining as a game?” What a great question. Though I must admit, upon first hearing this person in the row just behind me proposing this inquiry, the video game addict in almost had the professional me laughing very rudely out loud. “This person has probably never even played a video game, let alone has any understanding what one is,” I thought. However, this attitude misses the point, because it is something that interactive marketing is still definitely struggling to figure out. What do games mean to us?

Let’s start from the much broader idea of games in general. We all know what a game is. Trying to define it in terms of what the online marketing industry calls a game is probably going to be a pretty lousy compression of the idea. Games should be thought of by everyone in interactive marketing in a much broader sense. Every day, we are constantly devising little games with ourselves for a variety of reasons: keeping boredom at bay, making work more interesting or productive, keeping a relationship exciting, or even dealing with telemarketers (My tireless partner likes to ask them about the online marketing plan for whatever it is they’re selling and turn the call into a sales pitch for SAJE Media. Turnaround is fair play!).

We do this kind of activity all day, probably without even thinking about it. It all comes back to our innate desire for play. As long as its play, then it isn’t work, and then we suddenly feel good about doing it, even enjoy it. This is what games can bring to interactive advertising, the online shopping experience, even the beleaguered shopping cart!

Why is the online shopping cart always the same, boring, enter-the-same-old-data-for-the-hundredth-time-in-the-same-old-fields experience? It is such a key part of our transactions, and it hasn’t really changed since the first online stores appeared on the Net. At least that’s what I thought until I did a search for “coolest online shopping cart” and found a blog post leading to Panic.com’s product page. Panic.com is the home of a little Mac software design company best known for their excellent Transmit FTP program.

They have employed AJAX technology (heard of it yet? If not, then go find out right now) to great effect in a way that is totally simple, and totally revolutionary to the online shopping experience. You drag the items you wish to buy down to your shopping cart (the bottom ¼ of every page), and voila, the item is now in your shopping cart. If you drag something out of the shopping cart, and let it go, poof! It disappears into a snuggly little cloud of smoke, and is no longer in your cart.



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