New York-based Massive Incorporated has made it easier for global brands to get their ads to young male demographics with a new network that delivers the messages into the top-selling video games. The network spans platforms and genres sending ads via Internet-connected console and computer games.
The Massive Video Game Advertising Network already has arrangements with game publishers such as Vivendi Universal Games, UbiSoft and Legacy Interactive that enable ad delivery through more than 15 titles to reach a weekly audience of nearly two million young males. The company expects that audience to jump to 3.2 million by next year.
The ads are introduced seamlessly and unobtrusively into the gaming environment with no impact on game play or performance. Advertisers can change and update ads and choose the size of audience they want to reach, the duration of the campaign, the creative approach – and get the ability to track it all in real time.
The technology behind the network is a client-server system that delivers the ads into the video games and then measures and reports the results. Once integrated into the game, the Massive client library pulls ads from the server in the background of the game play and reports every time an ad is seen.
Audience can be segmented and targeted by demo, title genre, behavioural data, time of day, and other parameters.
The potential gaming audience according to Massive is about 70% of males aged 18 to 34, a group that spends as much or more time playing video games than they do watching TV.
In Canada, sales of video games and related equipment for the first three-quarters of this year totaled $416 million, a 9% jump from 2003, according to the latest figures from ACNielsen.
South of the border, a new report from research and consulting company the Yankee Group of Boston states that there are more than 108 million gamers aged 13-plus in the U.S. who spent $7.4 billion U.S. on video games last year. It expects gamers to number 126 million in that country by 2008.
Although the size and potential of this market is well-known, Yankee Group says advertisers only spent $79 million U.S. on in-game ads and advergaming in 2003 but spent $42.4 billion for ads on broadcast TV, a medium that is losing its attraction for the coveted young male demo.
Perhaps closing that final gap for marketers looking to make the leap into games, Nielsen Entertainment and gamemaker Activision recently announced they’re testing tools to measure in-game advertising audiences later this year. The guinea pig brand is Chrysler’s Jeep, which is featured in the newly released title Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, and interaction will be tracked via watermarking technology.
Last April the two companies hooked up to develop a games ratings system, and studies on effectiveness are also part of the union. Initial study findings report that the more highly integrated ads glean better recall, and that game ads memorability and intent to purchase impact is greater than TV.
