In-game Advertising (IGA) is what it says on the tin – advertising within games. Those of you who have played computer games may or may not have noticed the advertising within them, but either way there are an ample number of advertising opportunities within these games, so much so that Barack Obama used IGA for his presidential election campaign to raise awareness around his site voteforchange.com.
Barack Obama advertising in XBOS 360 game – Burnout.
In this article we’re going to specifically look at advertising opportunities within the popular game – Pro Evolution Soccer, and the benefits for a brand to use IGA. It’s important to note that the article just discusses the option of IGA on platforms that are connected to the Internet.
The first key point to notice about Pro Evo 2009 is the target audience; some what obviously the main audience for this game is 16-34 males. It is becoming commonly accepted that this target group in particular is ditching TV for computer games and thus Pro Evo has a UK forecast of 1,921,500 users overall in 2009. On the surface this may only be getting the same number of uniques as a small portal or popular entertainment channel online, however one of the key USP’s for IGA is the brand engagement level. It has been said that in-game advertising is found to be more effective than TV marketing, delivering a 500% increase in brand consumer awareness (1). Another factor to think about when discussing IGA is that these users actually want the ads to be within the game to add to the realistic effect of the game, thus a high proportion of users are in a much different mindset than most traditional methods of advertising.
So we have our target audience, we know how many consumers we’re hitting, we know they want to see the ads, we also have a 500% increase in brand awareness within IGA, but where can we actually advertise within pro evo, and how is it measured?
The basic premise of Pro Evo is a football game, which with its advanced technology is getting closer and closer to feeling like you’re controlling a real game of football. When we think about the advertising opportunities at a typical real life football game, these can be relayed easily into the computer game. This involves banners around the stadiums and training grounds sponsorship of the replays that are shown within the game and sponsorship of any overlays within the game
Banner within the game
Banner from a birdseye view
Replay Sponsorship
Sponsorship of overlays
Essentially IGA is bought on a similar buying model to brand activity online, on a cost per thousand impression (CPM) buy. The difference between IGA and a traditional CPM buy is you are only charged for an impression when it has been visible for a set amount of time (leading IGA advertisers Double Fusion say 10 seconds). This effectively cuts out a large amount of “wastage” which is every advertiser’s biggest nightmare to combat.
To briefly conclude: IGA is a growing market, it’s somewhat new in the marketplace, however reporting tools and research tools have now been developed so that an extensive amount of information can be relayed back to clients. I will discuss the types of information that can be researched in next months article.
(1) Brand republic March 2009
(2) Image 1, 1.2, 2 and 3 courtesy of DoubleFusion
(3) Image 4 courtesy of uk.gamespot.com
