Simply put: advertisers are already planning to target their ads at videogame tournament spectators. From Yahoo News/Reuters:
Peter Moore, the Microsoft vice president in charge of advertising for the Xbox business, described a scenario where a virtual race hosted by a corporate sponsor, with thousands of gamers competing for a grand prize while their buddies and competitors watch online.
Read all about it here.
I’d venture a 23 percent growth in online ad spending is significant, and that’s some of what this article over on C|Net discusses. I’m surprised it isn’t more considering how little the overall percentage is compared to traditional advertising. I mean, it’s going to grow to 8 percent of the total spent by 2010? That number seems low to me. Who the hell watches television anymore and why are they still throwing money at it? Kill your television.
Okay. So. Online videogames will have embedded advertising that not only customizes itself for the player, but keeps track of the player’s “eyes” (i.e. it senses when the avatar’s eye vector points at the ad in question and records a hit, time on “target”, whatever). Now comes word via Wired online of “Project Apollo”, a real-life ad tracking system. Hey, it might be a good thing. If the makers of, for example, Gas-ex ramp up sales in some city, one has to assume the audio is recording something important, and by extension that data might impact a “most livable city” standing. That follows. I mean, I have a right to odorless neighbors, don’t I?
Is this Life immitates Game?
Over the past couple of days I’ve been in contact with a few consumer product marketing contacts I have, asking them how the Marketing community in general views advertising within videogames and virtual worlds. The answers were, in all honesty, both disappointing and a bit shocking. These are not junior level marketers, these are experienced and highly-placed individuals. Yet not one of them seems to “get it”; worse yet, they haven’t paid enough attention to even know there is something to “get”.
Well, if there are any marketers reading this, I’d like to suggest taking a peak at Kevin Werbach’s viewpoint article over on BusinessWeek online. Then I’d suggest a rethink of the general concept of advertising – and in particular advertising budgets in new media formats; it’s probably orders of magnitude less than what most believe. Having done a little research, many might then not casually dismiss in-game/virtual world advertising as something they could never afford. Unlike television ads where a company pays for each airing, in a virtual world they really only have to pay once… and then let the world propogate your brand all on its own. It can be as simple as selling one product with all your advertising magically bundled inside it along with links to real life sales sites, and then letting each person who comes in contact with it, buy a copy of all that for themselves for use within their virtual home (note the expectation that virtual commerce will shortly exceed $1B annually). Of course that won’t make sense to most people. Just as one representative for the American Cancer Society’s Futuring and Innovation Center said yesterday at a virtual meeting conducted within the vr sim Second Life, the biggest barrier to acceptance is the inability of most organizations to understand the concept. You’d think that with all the economic turmoil out there, they’d be looking for opportunities. I’m learning otherwise.
Thought I’d just post some links to some interesting and (semi-) related stories.
“Get Your Game Off” (Wired) – gaming and sex.
“Minority Report”-style interfaces (New Scientist) – interaction on steroids.
$1B by 2010 (Yahoo/Reuters) – games and advertising. And since Yahoo story links die quickly, here’s a quote:
Advertising within video games, a hot new field for marketers, will likely surge eightfold to more than $1 billion in the next five years as companies court consumers who have cut back on television viewing, according to industry estimates released on Thursday.