Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Games and Advertising

It may be a little far-fetched from online gaming and advertising, but I found something interesting on video games that would work the same on online games. (link to full article)

“The kind of person that buys a Wii is not the same kind of person that buys a PS3 or an Xbox,” said John Greiner, the chief executive of Hudson Entertainment, the North American arm of Hudson Soft. “You have to be very specific when you design a game and target not only the gameplay mechanics for that user, but also the marketing for that kind of a product launch.”

Online games too would have different audiences. Thus, the target audience when marketing for the games or advertising on the games would also be different.

On a side point, I heard that advertising in games is not that effective, at least for people who love the game. On a study, they tracked the eye movement of the gamers of a racing game, and the ones who concentrated did not pay attention to the ads. Their eyes were glued to the car itself. Nonetheless, I guess that it works, since people keep advertising on games!

1 comment:

gerald lam said...

I wanted to touch on this point, because it's an area of interest for me and what we worked on for our term paper. There's so much hub-bub about videogame advertising these days, and oftentimes corporate-spun myths are enough to incite hysteric spending by advertisers, in fear that they're missing "the next big thing".

If you listen to oh, let's say, Massive, who makes a living off of placing those ads in racing games, they'll toss a thousand stats at you, talking about how "brand recall went up XX% with in-game advertising" (check out their website). That's fine and well, but what about Bunnyfoot's (a market research firm) report (http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20061221005340&newsLang=en) claiming that brand engagement from video games was actually lower than traditional forms of advertising? In-game ad networks like Massive love toting the fact that gamers find that in-game ads add to the realism of the gaming environment, but does that actually mean the ads are effectively communicating a marketing message?

The trouble, as with most forms of new media, is measuring ROI. There's not much in the way of keeping tabs of a gamer's consumer decisions after the in-game ad has been viewed. That's why I think the neatest solution for an advertiser to get into gaming these days is advergaming. You might find them on a lot of big corporation's homepages. They're neat, little games that are developed from the ground-up with the company's logo or mascot in mind, and are more brand-building experiences than attempts at hawking a product. But the brilliance lies in effectively converting neat gameplay into purchase decisions. You try to play the new Lego Indiana Jones game (http://indianajones.lego.com/en-us/games/default.aspx), and I dare you to resist checking out their online store for a gift for your niece or nephew, after you're done playing.