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How a Marketing Firm Hit the Gamification Bull's-Eye When sales are a game and customers are players, this Boston-based company wins big.

By Andrew Tilin

This story appears in the January 2015 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Talk about your tough customers. When Dailybreak Media founders Boris Revsin and Jared Stenquist set out in 2008 to monetize the college crowd through CampusLive, their first online venture, they quickly learned some hard truths about their target demo.

"They don't click on banner ads," Revsin says. "They want to be entertained by their advertising, and they want to be rewarded for spending time on the site doing anything."

Those lessons formed the basis of the duo's 2010 pivot into Dailybreak, a Boston-based marketing company that creates gamified brand experiences for the likes of Procter & Gamble and Chevrolet. These days clients shell out anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 for interactive content that engages potential customers by rewarding play and click-throughs with prizes: raffle entries, concert tickets, even a new car.