Study Shows In-Game Advertising Long-Term Bet

A MarketingSherpa survey of registrants for AD:TECH, an advertising conference to be held in San Francisco during April, shows that though in-game advertising is a smaller proportion of advertisers' budgets compared to other emerging forms of marketing, it may become one of the largest in the coming year or two. The January survey of marketers showed that only 10% of respondents planned to spend on product placements within video games during the next twelve months, the lowest response compared to other new forms of advertising such as ads on RSS feeds (40%), blog networks (30%), and sponsoring podcasts (14%). However, when asked which advertising schemes the marketers planned on investing in more than a year out, in-game advertising gained the biggest response, with 36% of respondents saying they intend to do placement within the games. Some of the current leaders among in-game advertising firms Massive Inc., one of the first to place dynamic advertisements in games such as The Matrix Online and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory; Double Fusion, which recently partnered with Midway for in-game advertisements in the developer's products; and IGA Partners, which featured ads in Valve's popular shooter Counter-Strike until legal issues forced them to desist. The effectiveness of well-designed in-game advertising was also profiled in a December report by game publisher Activision and Nielsen Media Research, conducted among 1350 active male gamers ages 13 to 44, in which the vast majority of gamers recalled a product in a game felt it fit the game they were playing. In fact, in discussing a Cingular advertisement placed in Need For Speed Underground 2, 69% of participants recalled seeing the ads, according to the survey.