Of all the things an individual can observe in this world, I think evolution has to be of the most enjoyable. The manner in which strategies and tactics progress through history’s timeline can tell you a lot about marketing in a Darwin-esque way.

What has worked. What hasn’t. What manners of marketing have stood the test of time and which ones have died off. Is gimmick a four-letter word? These are the types of things we should find ourselves questioning when embarking on a venture to influence sales and identification of a brand or product.

What I’m leading up to is my observation of branding through a presentation in which most people have repetitively been exposed but subconciously disregard as a marketing attempt. Yes, the silver ball. [cue The Who's Tommy]

In the glory days of video arcades, you could in most American cities find a basement to walk into filled with bells, whistles, and candy bars. These teenage havens were filled with a sense of youth, entertainment, and even a little competition at times. The dripping of pubescent sweat to achieve the high score in Galaga was not the only competition at hand in these joints however. There was something going on beneath the surface.

Kiss. Star Wars. Robocop. Major entertainment conglomerates. All invested into the exposure each brand could achieve by sitting in a video arcade. The target was right. All the teenagers were looking for ways to rid their pockets of that burning sensation seemingly caused by their allowance. What better way for the latest Batman flick to get their movie on the forefront of their target demographic’s minds than to create a heated battle of Batman Pinball. The strategy is seemingly all too obvious, but effective. Today’s marketers are taking notes.

Fast forward to the year 2006. Here we are, video arcades obselete. With the influx of home video games systems and popularity of computer games, the arcades of yesteryear are all but a dead breed. The strategies put into effect, however, by Data East and Sega on the pinball table are now being found all too common in branding efforts in cyberspace. When larger companies launch a new campaign or product, with a parallel correlation of emphasis on movies and such, Flash and Shockwave programmers take to the keyboard to implement a new interactive, online game of simplistic nature that web surfers can “monkey” around with for a little while to create excitement and buzz about the latest in the commercial world.

It’s really interesting and exciting how well channels have adjusted for the changes in technological innovation. The right target used to spend their time with friends at the arcade, popping quarters. Today’s generation, same age group, spend as much time (if not more) sitting at their computer “surfing the net” with friends on instant messenger. The strategy, the same, has adjusted for where to gain that exposure. These silver ball branding efforts taken online have so much more outreach than the traditional counterpart.

So we will define silver ball branding as such:

Silver Ball Branding: The marketing strategy originally implemented largely by Entertainment firms in the golden age of video arcades (pinball especially) to generate branding efforts targeted at an adolescent age group. Games were created with the theme of latest films and bands to generate buzz and excitement about upcoming products. This strategy is largely used by the same companies today in different channels of home video games but the main transferal of the strategy is to the Internet, in which quick and simple games programmed in Flash or Shockwave accomplish the same feat of pinball machines of yesterday.