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October 2007 - Strategy Magazine
Media

Are you getting your game on yet?

by Jesse Kohl
page 31

The console wars affect all marketers. With every gaming victory, there's the potential for mass audience casualties.

Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Wii are duking it out, fuelling the continual expansion of the player universe. PC-based games, especially ad-supported free ones, are thriving. And if your idea of a hardcore console gamer is (still) a 13-year-old boy, then you didn't notice when the Entertainment Software Association declared the average gamer to be 33 years old with a 38% chance of being female.

Wii is pushing the fun-for-the-whole-family angle to new heights. Millions of adults are playing casual games online as a way of bonding with their kids and grandkids. CEOs play online on company time. And as gaming consumes more consumers, it's also scoring a slice of more media plans.

Conveniently, the opportunity to reach this audience via dynamic in-game advertising - in a country known for high broadband penetration - is just as real as a billboard hanging over rush-hour traffic. The three big networks that sell live campaign ads into games - Massive, IGA Worldwide and Double Fusion - have Canada in their crosshairs. In a matter of hours, a marketer can get fresh creative into the latest action, adventure, racing and sports games.

The Massive network, based in New York and now owned by Microsoft, has been selling ads through a regional office here since 2005, targeting more than 500,000 Xbox Live subscribers in Canada - and in July, those gamers spent over five million hours playing.

IGA Worldwide, also HQ'd in New York, has Toronto-based Access Marketing selling in-game ads to Canadian advertisers with a promise of 3.5 million impressions per week. And San Francisco-based Double Fusion, which is actively selling placements in Canada, reaches millions of gamers via PC, online casual games and publisher/developer partnerships.

In a CPM-driven market, sources say rates for dynamic in-game ads are competitive with other online media - banners, big boxes - but the pricing varies depending on the media mix and on how many impressions are bought. Canadian advertisers are biting, with some paying anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 for a four-week campaign.

The majority of ad placements mirror the terrestrial world within the game. So in a stadium setting in a traditional sports title - Madden, NHL, NBA - the in-game media inventory could look pretty much like what you'd see at, say, the Rogers Centre. Until the advent of dynamic in-game advertising, most of the ads scattered around the stadium would have been static or fake, and built into the title at the point of publishing. For the gamer, Massive's VP North America and Asia Pacific sales Jay Sampson says, dynamic advertising means an enhanced experience and realism: updated messaging from a live campaign instead of just logo treatment.

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