Gamesville.com, a site that offers cash prizes to players of its online, real-time games, has allied with St. Petersburg, FL-based Catalina Marketing Corp.'s ValuPage.com shopping site to introduce both marketers' largely female audiences to each other.
As part of the deal, Gamesville has launched a new shopping category on its site, offering coupons of consumer goods manufacturers by ValuPage. These coupons can be printed and presented along with the promoted items at 10,600 stores participating in the ValuPage redemption program. Similarly, ValuPage's new Games section now whisks the visitor straight to the Gamesville site.
“The strategy for us is to leverage those assets and create a close-up cycle that combines online couponing with online games, and then tie it back to a real bricks-and-mortar supermarket [where the coupons can also be redeemed],” said Mark Herrmann, director of business development at Gamesville, Boston.
In the second phase, both Gamesville and ValuPage will jointly create a co-branded entertainment venue that will merge online game playing and coupon offers in an attempt to make online couponing fun, Herrmann said, declining to elaborate. This is planned for the first quarter of 2000.
