Adam Boyden (Xfire) and Andre Mahoney (Unilever) contributed to this piece.

Much has been written about the astonishing rise in Instant Messaging (IM) popularity. Even more has been written about the rising importance of gaming to marketers as 14-35 year old males continue to abandon television to play games online. In this article, will look at the connection between the two.

Instant Messaging as a Marketing Platform

IM has been the fastest growing communication medium in history. More than 100 million IM accounts have been created in the U.S. alone. 90 percent of 13 through 49 year olds use IM and over 12 million U.S. adult internet users use IM more than email. With the average user running IM for more than 2 hours per day, marketers have recognized the immense ability to leverage the platform to "promote affinity" as the BBC put it. iMedia contributor Gunjan Bagla summed up IM when he wrote that, "major advertisers and their agencies are now leveraging the medium of instant messaging as a mainstream interactive vehicle."

Challenges Remain Targeting Specific Groups with IM

Despite gains, traditional IM suffers from several shortcomings. First the user base is extremely diverse with wide ranges of age, sex and, in particular, interests. This has made it very difficult to turn IM from just an application into an actual community, where all the members communicate frequently with each other and share likes, dislikes, et cetera.  Granted, lots of different sub-communities can develop within IM but this complicates the challenge for marketers -- how do I reach my specific target demographic effectively and efficiently?

There is another problem which is less well known, but crucial to understand. In many circumstances, IM users have historically been forced to shut down their IM clients because the programs conflict with other applications running on their PC. Nowhere has this been more of an issue than for gamers who have to shut down their IM clients in order to ensure that games are not "Alt-Tabbed" to the desktop or crash while playing.

Why are Gamers Important?

The problem of traditional IM clients conflicting with games has huge implications for marketers. Gamers are an increasingly important demographic target not only because of their numbers -- over 70 million in the U.S. alone -- but also the purity of their demographic, with more than 92 percent of hardcore PC gamers being male and between the ages of 14 and 35. Better yet, gamers are well educated and affluent. To play a modern PC game requires a computer worth at least a few thousand dollars. Gamers are extremely social animals communicating with each other about everything that affects their lives, whether gaming related or not. The major difference for gamers is that their communication all takes place online through IM, forums, IRC, blogs, websites and voice chat.

Gaming is completely driven by the influencer model. Trends, whether gaming related, fashion, soft drink, cars, music or film, are determined by the hardest of the hardcore gamers who then influence less avid gamers.

Gaming Applications that Develop Community are Increasingly Popular

Companies such as Xfire have provided gamers with a unique solution which solves the traditional IM problem of crashing games because Xfire allows IM within a game. Xfire also has provided other community tools to improve the ease of gaming and the spread of community information. Xfire lets gamers see what games their friends are playing, do IM from within a game to friends outside the game, do voice chat while in-game, download files over a fast peer-to-peer system, and more. This has led to Xfire becoming the fastest growing online gaming community in the world with over 2.5 million registered users, each user running Xfire an average of 85 hours per month.

Targeting and Behavioral Marketing is Key

Xfire can track users by age, location, sex, historical and current game play behavior, as well as historical and current file downloads. This ensures that Xfire can implement extremely sophisticated behaviorally targeted marketing campaigns leveraging the Xfire ad units as well as file downloads, newsletters and events.

AXE Develops Powerful Campaign Leveraging Xfire's Application and Community

A major success of these marketing tools was amply demonstrated by Axe, a Unilever brand which was introduced to the American market in 2002. Axe is a deodorant body spray that helps keep guys smelling great and seeks to give them an edge in the mating game. In 2005 an Axe promotion was designed around a series of "amateur" films consisting of two unknown young men, Evan and Gareth. They traveled the country and engaged women by trying to determine what the best "moves" were for women to engage them. The campaign was developed to launch the new Axe variant, 'Unlimited,' that was based around the concept of "unlimited ways to get to a woman."

The campaign took advantage of Xfire's powerful file download system, built on proprietary peer-to-peer technology. In the beginning of the 4 month campaign, Xfire emphasized the Evan & Garreth movies "organically" and only downloaded movies to users which did not mention Axe or involved any celebrities. This ensured that the Xfire community soon started talking to themselves about the films using Xfire's IM chat, voice chat & forums, asking "who are these guys?". As the campaign developed and the popularity of the videos grew, paid placements on Xfire appeared as did videos featuring Axe products and branding.

The results of the campaign were spectacular:

• Fifteen of the 34 top downloaded files ever on Xfire were Evan & Garreth movies with a total of 530,747 movies downloaded.
• There was a 99.4 percent increase in awareness of who Evan & Garreth were with an astounding 222.5 percent increase in awareness of which products were really being featured.
• Over half (51.7 percent) of the Xfire user base stated their intention to buy Axe products at the end of the campaign
• And 38.7 percent stated they thought "Axe would help get the girl"

The key take away from the Axe campaign was that Unilever understood the importance of leveraging the highly influential yet difficult to reach nature of the gamer community, their constant desire to communicate, and their insatiable hunger for cool online content. In the end, combining the creative genius of the Evan & Garreth movies, Xfire's sophisticated targeting and behavioral marketing tools, and Xfire's huge gamer community helped significantly develop the Axe brand.

Mike Cassidy has been the Co-Founder and CEO of three start-ups: Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation.  Xfire helps gamers play online with their friends much more easily. Xfire is also an instant messenger and peer-to-peer file download system designed just for gamers. Xfire has over 2.5 million registered gamers in over 100 countries.  Direct Hit was a revolutionary Internet search engine whose customers included MSN, Lycos, AOL, and dozens of others. Ask Jeeves acquired Direct Hit for $500 million.  tylus Innovation's flagship product was the award winning computer telephony software Visual Voice.