Gamification has the advertising industry scrambling. Finally another buzzword to pitch high-cost campaigns that win awards and eyeballs without actually providing much value. Oddly though, advertising is probably the field which gains the least from gamification.

One of the new players betting hard on this new racehorse is Kiip. For long time followers of this blog you’ll remember I wrote about them in early 2011 in my post Kiip Gamifies Mobile Ads – And misses the point completely.

Not strangely, their strategy turned out not to work and they’re now pivoting to a new model. This time, Kiip is getting back to basics and making advertising games. Still selling on the old hype about gamification of course. In this article on Adweek CEO Brian Wong outlines the new offering while “making it clear” that this new model won’t replace the current one…

The problem is Kiip is still based on a flawed idea. Gamification and game mechanics will always work poorly in traditional campaign based marketing because a user needs to interact with the game mechanics many times for it to be fun in the first place. That suddenly makes a gamified campaign a product in itself.

Otherwise the campaign is just novelty, and in that case we need no game mechanics in the first place.

Remember the three rules of what can be gamified. For gamification to work in marketing, campaigns need to adhere to these rules.