A natural progression from the passive forms of promotions like commercials and billboards would be a more interactive medium to communicate a company’s products.

With the advent of smartphones and readily accessible computers, gamification is now going to be used for over 70% of the world’s top 2000 companies by 2014. The way that a company can now interactively market is slowly changing the marketing landscape.

Social Networks like Foursquare utilize gamification in order to reward customers who frequent registered establishments. The more you go to your favorite restaurant, the more you are rewarded with titles such as “mayor of xxx restaurant ” This type of social status reward can illicit competition between customers to increase the number of times a person will visit a restaurant.

Many companies like Marriott now utilize gamification in order to recruit potential employees. Marriott has its own game on Facebook that allows a player to manage a hotel restaurant. It allows users to get acquainted with the hotel industry while appealing to the Millennial demographic that many companies are now looking to recruit.

Gamification increases how much attention we pay to advertisements, which is especially important in the time poor society of ours with so much noise that has the potential to block out the marketer’s message.

If you doubt gamification can be effective, consider this: most Sauder classes have an iClicker system in place which assigns students points for getting the correct answers.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you pay attention so much when Tamar tells you to get your iClickers out!

This is a blog response to Catherine Caverly’s Ambush Marketing: Clever Or Unethical.

The debate presented in Catherine’s blog post is essentially, is it ethical for Nike to ambush market major sporting events where it isn’t the official sponsor?

While I don’t think Nike is being completely ethical, I still feel as though that ambush marketing isn’t unethical. Ambush marketing is a creative way of circumventing certain limitations that inhibit the company from marketing its products. It’s kind of like using tax accountants to reduce your taxes. If I make a lot of money and I use tax accountants to find loop holes to reduce my income tax, is that unethical?

Furthermore, Adidas and most of the grand sporting events are not vulnerable entities. The fact that the World Cup received $100,000,000 from Adidas to be its official sponsor means that both organizations have a great amount of capital to sustain and protect their corporations. Ambush marketing isn’t like McDonalds preying on the fat or lingerie for young girls, it’s a strategy employed by Nike designed to defeat Adidas.

Nike utilized ambush marketing to save a huge sponsorship cost while still advertising its own products. Nothing is stopping Adidas from being the official sponsor and also utilizing interesting online videos to inspire the average person to support athletics.

Ethics has always been a grey area, but my response to Catherine’s blog is that I believe ambush marketing is extremely clever,