PHD – Game Changers

If you’re going to stand in front of a room full of paying professionals and educate them, best not to let it slip that you’ve spent the past few days doing a ‘crash course’ on the topic you’re presenting. PHD’s CEO Mike Cooper bravely did just that, before reeling off a litany of stats to prove that gaming is huge. So far, so ad conference. After a few expected examples of ‘gamification’ for brands (oh, hello again, Nike fuel band and your very good case study friend, Apple) and a misguided attempt at improvement in public safety in Sweden (a rewards system that lowered driving speeds, but had no impact on the accident rate), the presentation moved into fresher territory: the gamification of the workplace.

At least the case study here was new, with PHD revealing how they’ve spent 3 years designing a kind of operating system for media planning, essentially allocating their staff points for different behaviours. Apart from the obvious performance review and optimization value, the platform also provides some insight into the types of work that individuals prefer to do and can be tuned to reward particular types of behavior, such as collaboration. The results seem to be sufficient for PHD management, who claim the system has given them ‘night vision’ into their store of talent.