An audience of 250 executives, mostly from advertising agencies, attended the first annual Advertising in Games Forum on April 14, 2005 in New York City. Some of the data provided to attendees by such speakers as Mitch Davis, chief executive of video game ad network Massive and Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman include:
* advertising in games is expected to rise to US$800 million in 2009 from nearly $120 million in 2004.
* US$266 million, or more than one-third of advertising in games in 2009, will come from ‘advergaming.’
* There are currently 100 million game-capable cellphones in the U.S. All mobiles being sold now are game-capable and the replacement rate of cellphones is every 16 months.
* 65% of the U.S. population owns a cellphone.
Goodman says while he has no specific figures on the Canadian market, percentage-wise the numbers should be similar for this country.

Sweetspot.ca, a localized Toronto e-mail newsletter and Web site (see MIC, Dec. 2/04) has just expanded into Montreal this month and has plans to invade Vancouver in late May or early June. The publication focuses on shopping finds of interest to upscale urbanites and those who would like to be.
There are now 5,000 subscribers to the e-mail, double the 2,500 it had when MIC interviewed the co. in early December. Visits to the site are holding steady (at 10,000 per week). But ‘that’s considered secondary,’ says founder Joanna Track, an Ogilvy account-side alum. ‘We mainly sell the e-mail. The newsletter’s pass-along factor is up to 25% that Sweetspot can track (those passed along using an embedded forward function), but, says Track: ‘A lot of people just press their [regular] forward button so we can’t track that.’ She says most days they see 10% to 25% pass-along.
Marketers have been hitching their wagons to the star in growing numbers and one must admit the target demo is an advertiser’s dream: primary 25-40, secondary 18-24, with a strong female skew (88%.) Forty per cent claim a $75,000+ income. Track says the newsletter acts as a great filter, with one story a day, on one topic. ‘It’s a very easy read and very digestible,’ she says. ‘Because we keep it short (200 words max,) a person can be in and out and we’re not intrusive.’

Cyberpresse launched a new Web site on Tuesday focusing on everything around the house: dwelling, gardening, renovation and decoration. The site, www.montoit.ca, is in French and derives its content from seven French-language publications, Cyberpresse partners La Presse, Le Soleil, Le Nouvelliste, Le Droit, La Tribune, Le Quotidien/Progrès-Dimanche and La Voix de l’Est.
Montoit.ca is targeting current and potential home and condo owners 25-49. It is expected that the gardening and decoration sections will attract more women while the dwelling and renovation sections will interest more men. Advertising is available on the site. Current participants include Hydro-Québec, CIBC, Bell, Honda and CAA Québec.

Wilton, Conn.-based Marketing Management Analytics (MMA) today announced the limited release of Avista by MMA Decision Support Service (Avista DSS). It’s a fully integrated, Web-based system available through an ordinary browser by subscription. It offers real-time analytics, ‘what-if’ planning, optimization, portfolio management and benchmarking capabilities. The system can track and diagnose performance, manage portfolios of brands, capture all marketing history, including performance data, in one location, forecast results, create dashboard views of key performance metrics and create marketing mix models.
The brains behind the system are an integrated database of real-time company and syndicated data, MMA’s proprietary models, and marketing experience based on more than 1,000 studies conducted by MMA on hundreds of brands and businesses in more than 20 countries. MMA is an independent operating unit of Carat.