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Marketers Say They Win With In-Game Ads
Laurie Sullivan
MediaPost
October 20, 2008
T-Mobile has inserted ads in Rockstar Games' new
Midnight Club: Los Angeles is scheduled to go on sale
this month. The game is made for the Microsoft Xbox 360
and Sony PlayStation 3 offers single-player and
multiplayer modes. Gamers can choose from 40 different
cars and motorcycles to cruse Figueroa or Sunset
Boulevard.
The ads feature the T-Mobile Sidekick as the in-game,
in-car communication device. Gamers can use the device
to communicate with other players or get information
about in-game challenges, according to Vijay Rao, VP
director of open planning at media agency Optimedia.
"The advertising spend is well worth the number of times
the gamer will come face to face with the brand," he
said. "It is common knowledge you can't reach 18-
to-34-year-olds with traditional advertising because of
their inherent skepticism. If you can incorporate the
brand into the game, you have a real chance in making
that connection."
T-Mobile is not the only brand allocating more
advertising spend on this emerging market. DoubleFusion,
San Francisco; IGA Worldwide, New York; and Massive see
a rapid move away from "experimental budgets" and into
six- and seven-figure network buys for 2009.
"Today, the average budgets for placing ads in
PlayStation 3 video games vary between $150,000/$200,000
and $400,000/$500,000 per campaign, capping out at about
$1 million," said IGA CEO and cofounder Justin Townsend.
"In the past two years, budgets have grown slowly from
$50,000 up to $100,000."
Jonathan Epstein, CEO at rival DoubleFusion, agrees. The
San Francisco-headquartered company has doubled revenue
and requests for proposals in the past year, with RFP
dynamic ad buys reaching between $30,000 and $300,000.
Massive, too, has begun to see more brands chasing
gamers where they live, including those in politics. The
Barack Obama ad that began appearing in a handful of
Electronics Arts video games on the Xbox 360 console
served-up by Microsoft in-game advertising subsidiary
Massive read "Early Voting Has Begun," and includes the
URL voteforchange.com.
The Obama ads run in billboards in stadiums and other
outdoor locations. While the campaign--scheduled to run
through Nov. 3--may vary per game, the ads are
geographically targeted, appearing in swing states such
as Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, North
Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin.
J. J. Richards, GM for platform services at Microsoft
Advertising, believes more brands are attracted to
in-game advertising because technology companies like
Massive have the means to "measure engagement by
counting impressions," giving a more accurate read. In a
car-racing game, for example, Massive's technology that
counts impressions is triggered after the car passes a
billboard ad an undisclosed number of times.
Earlier this month, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google
also made a play for gamers to demonstrate the strength
that in-game ads will have on advertising dollars.
Budgets rise, but the fledgling media still faces
significant challenges before it can take an even bigger
portion of ad spend from major brands. One issue that
media buyers have called out on the table is the need
for technology companies that insert ads to dig deeper
for data, although executives at DoubleFusion, IGA and
Massive believe their respective technologies can
support metrics well beyond other media.
For a game developer, the challenges remain in designing
ads into the game without affecting the play. "It's one
more level of complexity in an already very complicated
system," said Albert Reed, studio director at game
developer Demiurge.
It's become necessary for game developers to subsidize
royalties. In the past five years, console game budgets
have jumped, but retail prices remain between $50 and
$60. Game development costs for Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3
grew from several million a few years ago, to up to $20
million today.
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