The Power of Gamification: 10 Trailblazing Startups to Watch

With an expected market value of $30.7 billion by 2025, the widespread appeal of gamification is hard to deny. Today, it is a critical strategy for many global brands. Whether it’s LinkedIn's Diane Adams stating

"Gamification can make things engaging, interactive and fun,"

or functional features like Google Pay’s crisp virtual scratch cards, it clearly impacts the way we work, play and pay. Amid an ever-evolving digital landscape, marketing leaders worldwide realise there has never been a more important time to innovate.

Welcome to the world of MAD//Fest's 'House of Innovation', where innovation is not just celebrated, but is the norm. From searing customer analytics to engaging loyalty initiatives, the House of Innovation brings you face-to-face with the future of marketing. Here, we present you with a list of 10 gamification-driven startups making waves in the industry.

Expect a deep dive into how they’re leveraging the power of gamification to turn simple data into compelling user journeys, creating an indelible impact on consumer engagement across the board. Get ready to navigate this exciting maze where data meets delight, and riddle meets reward.

Aimera: Reinventing Interactions between Brands and Consumers

Launched in the heart of London, Aimera delivers an exciting shift in interactive marketing, fusing gamification, AI, and personalised engagement strategies. Unlike traditional one-sided marketing approaches, Aimera cuts through the noise and builds meaningful relations between brands and consumers. By creating immersive, goal-oriented challenges, Aimera fosters stimulating connections whilst educating customers about products and enabling brands to conduct market research intuitively. This fresh approach turns mundane transactions into dynamic games, hence enforcing brand loyalty and inviting higher user participation. The strength of Aimera lies in its innate capacity to transform strangers into loyal customers while preserving the user's freedom to interact on their terms. Reimagining the rules of customer engagement, Aimera is unquestionably paving the way for the gamified future of marketing. Despite its novelty, Aimera shows us that gamification isn't solely about playtime; it's about blurring the lines between work, play, and the everyday ritual of consumption.

Immersive Innovations with Itsreal_Immersive marketing?

Recalling the vibrancy of its home city, Milan, Itsreal_Immersive marketing? is a masterstroke in the innovative realm of immersive marketing solutions. Grafting technologies such as AR, VR and the Metaverse onto traditional marketing strategies, the startup creates fluently interactive experiences between consumers, brands and products. Their boundary-pushing ethos results in authentic human-centric connections, seamless touchpoints, and amplified brand values. Moreover, its commitment to strategic innovations projects its partners into the future, with language and business solutions in accordance with the evolving technological era. Itsreal embodies Immersive marketing’s game-changing potential, deftly leveraging gamification to paint a panorama of enhanced sales, business improvement, and compelling consumer engagement. Riding on the waves of gargantuan market value forecasts, Itsreal_Immersive marketing? proves to be a quintessential harbinger of the marketing industry's future.

Double Jump: Gamifying Everyday Life

Hailing from Turin, Italy, Double Jump is boldly venturing into the realm of gamification and engagement design. Its aim? To reimagine our daily practices - from work to education to community-building. Double Jump aspires to transform life into an invigorating game where engagement and enjoyment are key players. Think of it as a game-based learning environment, or, as live experiences that captivate individuals, thriving on the power of involvement to create memorable, immersive experiences. Their vision extends beyond individual amusements, however. Double Jump seeks to provoke a societal shift, reshaping the dynamics of how we learn, work, and establish communities. Presented with this ambitious forward-thinking approach, Double Jump positions itself as an evolving startup, proficiently manoeuvring through the fast-paced consumer industry, reshaping norms and paving the way for an innovative, gamification-led future. Their tenacity to morph mundane tasks into thrilling experiences is a game-changer in the truest sense.

Adact: Master Puppeteer of the Gamification Stage

From the heart of Estonia’s digital innovation hub, Tallinn, comes Adact. They are bringing in a revolution, empowering brands to craft marketing campaigns or drive employee engagement with a tool not requiring the complexity of coding. Aligning with the rising demand for creatively captivating consumer attention, Adact's genius lies in the simplicity of its model.

As brands scramble to make sense of the fast-paced consumer goods industry, Adact is poised perfectly to facilitate this shift. Their tool aids the creation of compelling journeys from simplistic data, thereby making paths that didn't exist before. It's an innovation that isn’t just appealing, it's necessary. Wide arrays of brands can harness the potential it offers, leaving a distinctive impression on the consumer and their behaviour.

Adact is now more than a startup to observe - it's the pioneer other gamification innovators aspire to emulate. They’re not just playing the game; they’re changing the rules.

Gust: Transforming Marketing with Engaging Gamified Experiences

Hailing from Helsinki, Gust is revitalising the marketing landscape with a fresh, game-centric approach. Relying on the potency of their Playable licenses, Gust creates world-class marketing games that aren’t just garnishing attention, they're altering user engagement patterns. Their modus operandi bridges the gap between creativity and technical prowess, integrating the best talents from diverse disciplines into a cohesive, results-driven network. Gust’s adroit amalgamation of design, technical know-how, and user acquisition strategies is reinventing how businesses perceive marketing mechanics. But Gust's fundamental innovation doesn't rest solely on gamification per se - it's their execution. Each game is meticulously crafted to narrate brand stories, making the user experience interactive, engaging, and ultimately, memorable. By driving consumer engagement through on-trend gamification, Gust showcases how data and creativity, when synergised, can create marketing solutions that are not only potent, but fundamentally transformative.

Connecta Magic: Melding Unique Designs with Interactive Gamification

Based in Cyprus, Connecta Magic has built its reputation on the creation of tailor-made designs and a robust interplay of online and offline marketing strategies. Stripped to its essence, their operation hinges on the potency of "gamified" marketing. Fostering customer relationships that withstand the test of time is at the heart of their philosophy, along with promoting brand engagement that keeps consumers looping back for more. Their mysterious mélange of 'adding the magic' might puzzle on the surface, yet hints towards intriguing innovations in the digital gamification space. No matter how rapid the velocity of the ever-accelerating digital realm, Connecta Magic appears geared up to thrive, entwining time-honoured marketing principles with the dynamism of gamification. Their story unfolds as an inspiring segment of the gamification revolution, encapsulating the potential of this nascent modality.

The Mobile Wallet Company: Redefining Customer Engagement

In an era increasingly dominated by digital wallets, the UK-based startup, The Mobile Wallet Company, is making impressive strides by merging the power of mobile wallet technology with the web of gamification. By utilising native smartphone technology, they deliver loyalty rewards and coupons directly into users' digital wallets, innovatively and efficiently driving customer footfall. Their solutions deftly sidestep traditional commercial ad placements whilst ensuring GDPR-compliant, real-time tracking of customer behaviours, thus providing a tempting blend of data-driven marketing potential and consumer privacy adherence. By supercharging the principles of gamification on the mobile platform, they are essentially turning every push notification and app interaction into an enticing twist in the journey of consumer engagement. As they partner with both high street retailers and direct Brands, The Mobile Wallet Company is carving out a significant niche in a multi-channel marketing realm where the customer journey is transformed into a game well-played.

Disrupting the Domain with Smatched

Redefining the marketing paradigm, Heidelberg-based startup Smatched employs a trailblazing 'earn to play' marketing strategy, injecting joy into the consumer experience. With its gamified app-based platform, businesses can transform monotonous brand messaging into enticing gameplay. It effectively inverts traditional advertising paradigms to create memorable interactions that engage customers in a manner that they find personally rewarding. With Smatched, companies can surge ahead of competition by strategically deploying their brand messages across an omnichannel landscape, ensuring captivating continuity at every touchpoint. By combining the potency of leading-edge tech with the actionable insights generated by sophisticated data analysis, Smatched allows businesses to understand their patrons better, thus amplifying brand value. Intriguing and impactful, Smatched masterfully exemplifies the intersection of data, delight, and reward.

Clavit: Reinventing Advertising Through Gamification

Emerging from Spain's city of Cordoba, Clavit attempts to revolutionise the advertising sphere with a unique gamification-based approach. Positioning itself as pure "customer intelligence", Clavit designs captivating brand challenges, transforming potential customers into active participants, who are rewarded with discounts and prizes. This playful engagement allows brands to subtly showcase their products while gathering valuable information about consumer preferences. Unlike traditional advertising methods, Clavit's platform sends the brand message directly into customers' daily digital routines, eliminating the need for disruptive adverts. Beyond this, the application cleverly transforms this data into simplified performance reports, arming professionals with the knowledge to optimise customer retention strategies. In the era of digital fatigue, this new form of interactive advertising could be an engaging breath of fresh air. As Clavit's journey unfolds, we eagerly watch if this fresh take on advertising will redefine the engagement in the advertising world.