Annalie Killian, Catalyst for Magic, Amplify Festival / AMP Services Limited

SuperNova Award Category

Technology Optimization & Innovation

The Company

Amplify Festival is an immersive learning event (TED-style) and ongoing innovation experiment created inside AMP, the leading independent wealth management company in Australia and New Zealand. AMP helps people and organisations build financial security through superannuation, wealth protection and investment services.

The Amplify Festival and global thought leaders it attracts connects the enterprise and its employees, partners, customers & the community to the disruptive trends and breakthrough technologies that transform human behaviour and flips business models.

It takes the form of a week long festival that takes place inside the company premises, during office hours and concurrent with business-as-usual deliverables. Employees are encouraged to attend interactive thought leader sessions/ workshops for free but must self-manage their workload and time in order to participate in Amplify .

Since 2005, Amplify has grown into the largest business innovation & learning platform in Australia drawing 2000 unique visitors from employees, partners, customers and the public at large.

The Problem

The Amplify Festival is a huge investment in the human capital development of AMP and future-proofing the skills of 8000 employees dispersed in locations across Australia, and 13 international offices.

Catching and holding their attention is hard and competes with the information overload we all face in our day-to-day busy jobs from a range of screens and devices screaming for our attention.

Amplify offers a rich & complex programme of 88 events in one week (as well as live webcasts) The offer to employees is free but requires them to take time away from their desk during office hours to learn, experiment with ideas and interact with the future. Amplify thus competes against work deliverables, project deadlines and the tyranny of distance and isolation for thousands not physically located in / near the physical venue.

The Solution

To gain cut-through and deep engagement around Amplify festival by employees, we built AMP's first massively multi-player online game (MMOG) that progressively revealed all the dimensions of the 88 events of the Amplify Festival.
The Amplify Game enticed gamers to engage with Amplify’s core messaging by constructing point-scoring challenges like a quiz that necessitated research, eg  articles on the Amplify blog, clues embedded in Augmented Reality Posters etc

We embedded the game also into a bespoke Amplify iPhone App. Through the game and the app, employees had to learn to use new technologies they hadn't encountered in the workplace before, like augmented reality, 3D printing, and crowd-fund investing.

The challenges drove engagement, fun, meaning and purpose and harnessed the competitive nature of employees through a real-time leader-board, daily prizes and random prizes. Because of the game's digital execution, we could track and measure participation in real-time and make tweaks on the fly.

The Results

The game launched 2 weeks out from the Amplify Festival start date and the take-up was surprisingly rapid with 980 employees playing, and persisting!

Immediate and local results:

By creating AMP's first ever gamification experiment, we were able to cut-through noise, fully engage interested parties with the Amplify Festival, and keep them engaged from 2 weeks prior to the festival, throughout the week of Amplify and even post Amplify for completing the survey and voting on ideas posted to the crowd-sourced ideas platform.

The most significant impact was how it connected and engaged staff across all business units and geographies, and we believe it was instrumental in driving the 3132 unique viewers of the live webcast.

Long-term impact:

AMP is a traditional financial services organisation with a 150 year history and median age of employees is 41. This first massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) proved that age and "type" of target market was not a barrier to success. Our success grabbed attention from Corporate Affairs, Marketing, to HR and inspired the business line leaders to look at how gamification can be used to win, service and retain customers.

The Technology

Our overall solution was a game using gamification theory. The solution was home-grown by the Amplify team- and our first ever attempt at designing and deploying a game. The game design included immersive learning interactions with disruptive technologies:

  • a mobile app,
  • augmented reality 
  • RFID and gamification

Whilst our own team designed the game and challenges, we partnered with a range of suppliers to help execute and integrate the game into our other technology asses. Our website developers, ONQ built the gamification API in Drupal on top of our website. The Nest developed our mobile app – which received lots of praise. Centryc provided our RFID solution using a combination of Android devices and RFID stickers.  We used Vuforia for the Augmented Reality component.

Metrics 

  • In just 10 days the Amplify Game achieved 980+ players (1/4 of all Amplify attendees), generated 40,000 touches in the API,
  • Employee registrations soared after the game launched and overall registrations were up from 7919 in the previous event to 10091 for this year ( a growth of 22%).
  • Engagement was wide-spread across business divisions ( traditionally hard) and multiple locations of the business where employees often feel isolated from head office in Sydney  (We have offices across other cities in Australia, New Zealand, and 13 international offices). 

Disruptive Factor

Since Dr Jane McGonigal, the world's leading MMOG thought leader spoke at Amplify, we have tried to get a business case across the line to experiment with game theory as a customer/ employee engagement strategy but it always fell short on the old "Prove the ROI argument and budget constraints.

This time, we just built it ourselves and proved we could do it fast, cheaply ( Less than $10 000 spent) and achieve incredible results.
Our team wanted to use a medium that was simultaneously the message ; i.e. apply disruptive technology that would
- Demonstrate design-thinking
- Get communication cut-through, disrupt corporate routine and provide an emotionally engaging experience
- Build game theory capability in-house and demonstrate the value of gamification as a strategy
- facilitate learning for large numbers of people through doing
We proved that regardless of age, people will engage with meaningful and interesting challenges through gamification and that it's an excellent "pull" strategy to gain deep engagement in an era of information overflow where messages are constantly "pushed" in a way that creates noise and low conversion.
 

Shining Moment

Some players became so engaged with the game that they 'hacked' the game in order to cheat their way to more points! We expected this rogue behaviour, and dealt with it by inviting these individuals to help develop the game further, harnessing their over-zealous enthusiasm to help improve the game and spread the news across the AMP employee population.

We were also contacted by several non-hacking players who were desperate to find out new ways to score points. This led to us creating a 'hints and tips' regular post on the intranet, so gamers could keep in constant contact with the game developers and find new ways to interact with Amplify Festival, thus earning themselves more points in the game.
 

About Amplify Festival

Amplify Festival is Australia’s leading festival for discussing business innovation with some of the world’s boldest thinkers.

Powered by AMP, Amplify is an engine for exploring edge-thinking, disruptive technologies and emerging trends that impact business.

Founded in 2005, Amplify Festival is held every two years, and in 2013 featured 43 global thought leaders, 98 sub-events across two cities and a publicly available live stream of all keynote sessions. In total, 5,000 people took part in the event, either in person or by watching online.

In between Festivals, Amplify offers bite-sized ‘Samplify’ events – hour-long speaker sessions and workshops with creative professionals. Samplify sessions are curated for anyone who wants to keep up with the latest thinking on the future of business.