Screenshot of pongr.com
Pongr, a mobile image search technology startup, recently launched a picture-sharing social game as a core product offering. Des Moines-based Pongr co-founder, Zach Cox, answered a few questions from us by email about this new direction.
Silicon Prairie News: What is the new Pongr game?
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Zach Cox: Pongr is a picture-sharing game that gives you the opportunity to become the CEO of your favorite company or brand. The goal is to climb the career ladder from intern all the way up to CEO, influencing real life conversations with the brands you love and sharing exciting deals with your friends. We at Pongr believe that passionate brand-loyal customers deserve to be regularly rewarded with discounts, special offers and exclusive deals not available to the masses, and this game paves the way for this unique experience.
Photo taken from our July interview with Cox: Pongr’s Zach Cox talks about mobile tech & expanding Iowa team.
Is this a change in company strategy or is Pongr still working with brands in advertising campaigns?
Not really a strategy change. We’ve been doing the direct-response marketing via pictures for a while now and we realized that many of the things we were providing were helpful to brands who were trying to measure purchase intent via engagement through the Pongr ad campaign add-ons (I say add-ons because that’s exactly what they were/are – additional promotional tools tacked onto existing media campaigns). The game is a way for us to amplify all of this. We needed to scale our own business in such a way that it would speed up the education process for customers to realize that people already take pics of their brands (e.g. an existing behavior that needs to be brought into the context of managed campaigns).
Most importantly, we noticed that people were already taking lots of brand related pics. So the game was a natural extension of existing behavior coupled with a business objective.
Frankly, we think that brands and consumers really want the same things – high quality value that brings meaning to them. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to make the right matches (between consumers and brands) in this fast-moving, on-the-go world. Hopefully Pongr can serve as a platform to connect brand fans with ad campaigns that genuinely offer real rewards.
How have brands embraced the Pongr game?
Brands are doing a lot of experimental marketing these days with mobile and social. That said, our goal is to take this out of the experimental world and into mainstream, sustainable marketing. To do that, we’re focusing on traditional methodoligies around loyalty programs, brand ambassadors, and showcasing value (via pictures). Hearst Media, Bonnier Corp, Dunkin Donuts, The Ford Motor Company, Rolex, and others have been supporters of Pongr’s objectives.
At the end of the day, direct response marketing is still an important part of what mobile and social means to brands. It’s so important to make sure that the person targeted is a bona fide lead. We care about the intersection of paid media and earned media. Specifically, Pongr amplifies paid media by directing the hardcore fans to jazz up the earned media on their behalf.
Some people received a “founder” t-shirt in the mail prior to the game launch, what is that promotion?
We wanted to do something fun that would involve teaching people that Pongr is more than just taking pics of products. It’s about people, happy people, with the products they love. Our hope was that people would pose naturally with the brands that they wanted to express some love for. Many people sent in the picture with their Founder shirts on and it has been fun to see more and more of these pics show up. We have plenty of work cut out for us, but it’s clear that people love posing with brands that bring meaning to their lives.
To see another promotional part of Pongr’s new product release, view their “How It Works” video:
For more about Pongr, check out my July interview with co-founder Zach Cox: Pongr’s Zach Cox talks about mobile tech & expanding the Iowa team.
