Some of the DNA Advertising team pushed aside their mice and picked up their joypads as they headed down to Extended Play, Plymouth’s first Games event discussing the future of the games industry and the positive impact it can have on the region’s emerging and talented producers, artists and developers. From console to phone, web to multiplatform, the games industry has become a dominant force in the media and design world. With the southwest traditionally being a fertile breeding ground for game developer talent, Extended Play looks to highlight the slowly emerging games industry in the region and uncover what opportunities exist for studios.

The British Council’s young interactive entrepreneur of the year, 26 year old 
Paul Croft of MediaTonic, took to the stage for his keynote, centering his talk around the ‘origin point of success’, about his experiences in becoming such a recognised player in the industry and the future of brand game design and scope for ‘advergames’.

Traditionally smaller developers take most of the risks without pressure from clients and company overheads, riding the curve and making their mark at just the right time. This window for exploitation however, is extremely narrow. As the technology and route to market become more conventional and a trend begins to form, it’s only a matter of time before well-known development houses grab the monopoly, running with the idea and doing it bigger and better. This is even more apparent today, with a 6 monthly transition in fads, making iPhone apps ‘so last season’ and with Farmville being the biggest game in the world, it’s now all about social gaming and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Although it may still seem fresh, within the industry the App bubble has pretty much burst. There is still money to be made, but with over-saturation of Apps it’s already no longer the method of choice… On the flipside, with over 61.6million active users of Farmville on Facebook, it affirms the potential of social online gaming as the next big advertising and brand building medium… In another 6 months it’ll no doubt be another story.

As part of our ongoing drive to reduce our paper usage and to pass on some festive merriment we’ve produced a web based, simple flash based animation with some festive fun interactivity.

We hope you’ll enjoy dressing ‘Frostie the Throw-man” up and chucking him around, click to play!

http://www.dnaadvertising.co.uk/xmas2008

Merry Christmas!
The DNA Team.

When tasked by Beverage Brands to come up with two interactive programmes, we seized the opportunity to make them as comprehensive and practical as possible. The Bay Builder and Fridge Builder interactive applications (built entirely in Flash), use an intuitive drag-and-drop functionality as a means to demonstrate the best shelf or bay stacking practice for wholesalers and bar staff, which ultimately improves profits. After creation, stacking configurations can be saved, loaded, re-edited and printed all within a stand-alone application that requires no connection to the internet – making it very versatile and more portable!