Gravy turns shopping into an interactive gaming experience

Gravy, a Madison, Wisconsin-based startup, is transforming mobile entertainment and brand advertising while donating money to nonprofits.

And they’re doing it through a live shopping game for mobile devices.

Innovating a new media format

Gravy turns shopping into an interactive gaming experience by giving users the chance to compete for huge discounts on the newest products such as the iPhone X, XBox, and Beats headphones.

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“We’re trying to create more of an interesting media model where we’re gamifying the shopping experience through branded experiences,” said Craig Andler, Gravy cofounder. “Some people have said it’s a bit of a Price Is Right meets QVC.”

Andler, along with Gravy’s other two cofounders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire, have a history of working together mostly in online services and the adtech space.

Andler and Wiegand previous worked together on Hopster which they exited out of to Inmar, and McGuire previously founded eCommerce live search company, Jellyfish, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007.

“With Gravy, we decided to come back together,” said Andler. “We really saw a big opportunity in live. We looked at it as a new, evolving media format that hadn’t seen much innovation.”

Turning a game into social good

Every night at 8:30 EST, Gravy airs a live, host-led experience featuring one product for sale at a dropping price. The “Daily Gravy” shows are roughly 15 minutes long.

Every second a player waits, the deal gets better. But if a player waits too long to buy, they might miss out since the quantity of available products is hidden.

The founders say that since Gravy’s inception, social good has been a part of its blueprint. Gravy contributes at least 20 percent of every dollar spent on in-game purchases to a charitable cause. Sometimes, the donated amount from a night’s show is as high as 100 percent.

“When users make their purchase, they have the ability to direct a portion of their payment to [a charity of their choice from our available options],” said Adler. “In some cases it’s thousands of dollars that we can raise pretty quickly.”

Since officially launching in June, Gravy has already donated $10,000 to charitable causes to organizations including Worldreader, Prevent Cancer, Lustgarten Foundation, Purple Heart Homes, Boys and Girls Club of America, National Forest Foundation and Camp Kesem.

New frontier in live gaming

The app’s audience grows more than 15 percent week-over-week––a growth rate and potential charitable impact the cofounders call “exceptional” for the relatively new world of live gaming.

“Live as a market has been gaining traction with platforms like Twitch, [which is dedicated to real-time streamers who are streaming their live game], and a few other things in game sports,” said Adler. “If you were to narrow it down even more and look specifically at the game show vertical, With the exception of HQ Trivia, I don’t think there’s been a ton of winners.”

Adler said one challenge of the vertical is enticing people to go back to the model of scheduled viewing in today’s on-demand world led by entertainment giants like YouTube and Netflix.

“We have been born into this recorded world where we can watch what we want, where we want, when we want,” said Adler. “For appointment viewing experiences, if viewers are going to make that trade off of having to be somewhere at a specific time and place, the content better be unbelievably compelling. Fortunately, I think we’ve been able to come up with something pretty interesting.”

That compelling content structure pays off for the brands being featured during the games that get time to educate consumers on their product, introduce their story and communicate their value.

“When we look at an individual show, it’s somewhere between 12 to 14 minutes in length,” said Adler. “About three-quarters of that is exclusive branded content. We’re getting users spending about seven to nine minutes of time with a brand which is unbelievable in internet time where it’s difficult to even get ten to 15 seconds.”