Play up, play up, and get your answers.

People love computer gaming. Industry worth has rocketed past $100 billion as it masters the techniques for leading people to respond and respond … just what online research strives for.

Noting the similarities, Lightspeed Research set out to pioneer ‘surveytainment’ – to ‘gamify’ copy-testing techniques for print ads.

As well as coining new words, this fresh approach has generated new techniques: a ‘flash test’ that differentiates between getting attention and actual appeal; a ‘curiosity’ measure that predicts reception of follow-up ads; a gamified ‘zoom’ test to measure the speed of message delivery; a new binary rating that provides more differentiated, accurate ratings from fewer respondents.

And a bonus – the integrated game-like rewards and challenges have respondents ‘playing’ copy-testing surveys week after week with almost no dropout, and without payment.

Lightspeed Research, with their client, the Outdoor Media Centre, are using this development to educate the whole UK outdoor industry on best practice in ad testing techniques, presenting the results at the ARF Conference in April 2014.

It’s early days, but this innovation has opened doors to promising opportunities for Lightspeed. And also discussions with TNS who are interested in scaling up these techniques.