Business & Games: The Blog

Continue reading "IAB Defines Types of Game Advertising" »

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by: Alain Thys

When she was eight, my wife invented a game called "The Yellow Car Conspiracy".  In this game, all the kids who participated, were on watch to spot yellow cars which might drive through their street, stop in front of buildings or engage in other types of suspicious activity.  If all kids worked together - the theory went - they would surely uncover the mystery that lingered about all these yellow cars hovering through town.

Continue reading "When will ARG's hit the brand radars ?" »

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Coca-Cola has launched a contest to design a virtual experience vending machine. Also see the press release here. My co-contributor Karl Long already wrote a fairly positive review, but I'm afraid I have to add some negative points of view here.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. One the one hand, this contest has a lot of the 'right' elements - community involvement, ask people to create something in an environment where they are already used to self-creation, let the final results be used by everyone for free inside SL. The concept of a virtual experience vending machine is nicely creative. Also they opened it up beyond SL residents, by simply asking for designs, not acutally fully built machines. 

Continue reading "Coke Virtual Thirst: A for effort, C- for execution" »

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eMarketer.com reports:

"In-game advertising will evolve in scope and sophistication, offering new platforms for marketers, new business opportunities for technology providers and vital revenue for game developers, who have struggled with the escalating production costs of increasingly complex games," says eMarketer Senior Analyst Paul Verna, the author of the new Video Game Advertising: Getting to the Next Level report. "eMarketer estimates that over the next five years video game advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%, reaching nearly $2 billion by 2011."

Continue reading "eMarketer: Video Games Are Getting Down To Business" »

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Found this article that breaks away from the US/EU zone and gives some info on the advent of advergaming into the Indian gaming market. 

Continue reading "Indian Advergaming" »

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Continue reading "Gamevertising News" »

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Continue reading "To: Advertisers, Subject: Hi" »

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MochiAds is the world's first advertising network for casual games. Comprised of two facets, MochiAds enables advertisers to reach a highly sought-after demographic through engaging, virally distributed Flash games and simultaneously provides game publishers an effective, non-obtrusive revenue channel to support their creative talents. Together, MochiAds offers a powerful and deep-reaching platform to deliver a memorable brand message.

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Continue reading "Counter-Strike, Now With Ads" »

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Continue reading "GameDaily BIZ: Using In-Game Ads to Draw in Your Target Audience" »

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Continue reading "Press Release: Take-Two signs with Double Fusion" »

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Continue reading "Philips Design to enter Second Life" »

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• Jeff Brown, an EA spokesman, said the Redwood City, Calif., company, the world's largest games publisher by sales, estimates it will bring in between $4 million and $5 million in advertising revenue during the holiday quarter from Need for Speed: Carbon, a version of the game that EA began selling earlier this month.

• Just under half of Need for Speed: Carbon's advertising revenue will come from "dynamic" advertisements, which are regularly transmitted over the Internet and inserted into the action of the game, a source of revenue that hasn't existed in previous EA games.

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   Parents are not upset about video game violence. Instead, many are upset with the ‘real time advertising’ for video games their kids are seeing.

Continue reading "NBC-2.com On In-Game Ads" »

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Continue reading "In The News: Measuring in-game ads efficiency" »

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Judging by the growing number of media clippings on the subject, I’m afraid in-game ads are turning into the next shiny thing.

“Agency Avatars,” AdWeek, October 9, 2006, Eleftheria Parpis. Quote from Leo’s chief creator Mark Tutssel: “This is right on the edge of a new space.”

“Virtual Worlds: The Next Realm in Advertising?” Brand Channel, Bill Nissim, undated (Sept 2006?)

“Video Games Now a Social Experience,” Ad Age, Gavin O’Malley, October 5, 2006

“Leo Burnett Buys Space in Virtual World,” Ad Age, Jeremy Mullman, September 28, 2006

“Advergaming: You Got It,” Business Week, David Radd, October 10, 2006

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IGA’s Darren Herman blogs about the recent OMMA panel on advergaming, calling it a farce. Hard to disagree. While advergaming has clear advantages in certain situations for certain demographics, I don’t see how you can make a sweeping argument in favor of advergaming over in-game advertising (or the other way around).

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The big news of the week: two large ad agencies, Leo Burnett and Bartle Bogle Hegarty, have announced plans to open offices in Second Life (links to the announcements).

Leo works with Millions of Us on an Ideas Hub that will become a collaborative space for the agency’s creative people (AdAge). The creatives will apparently have to learn the new interface and port their works as textures into the world. You can visit the commemorative tree marking the initiative at Millions of Us 190,82,23. Leo Burnett Toronto’s blog has the full text of the press release and a few comments. Csven at reBang also offers his thoughts: “Someone needs to tell these old agencies that the first rule of Web 2.0 (and Second Life) is: Don’t go around bragging about how you figured it out and are now (finally) going to set up an “ideas hub”.

Continue reading "Leo Burnett, BBH Ready Second Life Offices" »

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Media Post: “Games built around a brand, or advergames, are often a better option for marketers than placing ads within a game, a panel of executives said Tuesday at the OMMA conference in New York.

Advergames usually are relatively cheap to produce, and simple to distribute, the executives said. What’s more, advergames don’t require the same degree of coordination between different parties as ads served while consumers are playing a game.”

Of course, all panelists were from the advergaming companies. Blah.

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“WPP has bought a 3.4% stake in Wild Tangent for an undisclosed sum. WildTangent sells in-game ads for its in-house developed games as well as for third-party games developers. Mark Read, WPP strategy director, said the move would allow the group’s clients to tap into WildTangent’s in-game advertising network.”
– Brand Republic

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“Electronic Arts’ top video game advertising executive, Julie Shumaker, announced [August 14] she has joined Double Fusion as vice president of sales. Most recently, Shumaker was national director of sales for video game advertising.”

– Mercury News
– Double Fusion’s press release

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Adotas does Q&A sessions with the execs from Massive, IGA and Double Fusion. The questions:

1. Has the industry grown large enough that you could consider other in-game advertising companies as serious competition, or is it still a wide open market?

2. In what direction is the in-game ad formats heading: display ads like on billboards, or in-game product placement?

3. Is there an industry standard for measuring in-game ads?

4. How useful do you think in-game metrics are, since games can be played both on and off-line on a whole bunch of different platforms?

5. What sort of games are more easily combined with advertising? What do you do for games that aren’t sports or set in a present-day location? What about fantasy, sci fi games, or even puzzle, arcade, and casual titles?

6. Do you think it’s possible in the future that some high-profile games could be entirely ad-supported?

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part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Ariel Spoonhammer: A barrage of questions to Razor: How did the SL store get approved internally within AA? Why did you opt to sell clothes for what in SL is a significant amount of money instead of giving them away? Do you plan to advertise your store both in RL and SL? Do you think SL is the kind of place where AA’s “risque” ad strategy can go even more “risque”?

Continue reading "Panel on Marketing to Virtual Avatars, Part 5" »

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Ansible Berkman: Susi?

Susi Spicoli: Do you think that we will go beyond traditional marketing: participation in product development, open-source like, which makes traditional marketing obsolete to some extent because consumers are designing their own products? For example, a bank might design (with users)/test their future offering incl branch lay-out, which then already will have a strong in-world following which will spill into the RL. Finally, you might get some great international ideas fertilization (easy in SL), what if Italian customers would give comments and ideas on American Apparel?

Continue reading "Panel on Marketing to Virtual Avatars, Part 4" »

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Ansible Berkman: And now, we already have a few questions lined up. Let’s see what the audience has to say. Divo?

Divo Dapto: My question is what essentially is the difference between the real world and virtual words - from a marketing communications perspective? In other words, what opportunities do virtual worlds offer that real world does not?

Continue reading "Panel on Marketing to Virtual Avatars, Part 3" »

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Ansible Berkman: We shall begin with a small blurb from each panelist on a very broad question I’ll ask them and then the conversation will be open to the audience. Please right-click on me and send me a note if you would like to participate. I’ll hold a queue of individuals and call on you when the person before you has finished “speaking”.

Continue reading "Panel on Marketing to Virtual Avatars, Part 2" »

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part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Today, Harvard’s Berkman Center hosted a panel discussion titled “Avatar-Based Marketing: What’s the Future of Real-Life Companies Marketing to Second Life Avatars”. The two-hour event took place on Berkman Island in Second Life. Panelists included the following avatars (pictured above, left to right, real names in brackets, info taken from the event’s notecard):

Continue reading "Panel on Marketing to Virtual Avatars, Part 1" »

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Paul Hemp at Harvard Business Review finished his article on avatar-based marketing (they do have long lead times at HBR). Here’s a corresponding podcast and Paul’s interview with Ad Age. The core idea: “Companies spend large sums trying to segment, reach, and influence potential customers. They should think about targeting those customers’ online alter egos, as well.”
Tony Walsh from Clickable Culture commented, and so did Garrett French at Search Engine Lowdown.

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