Data: Gamers Not Averse to In-Game Ads

Study by comScore, press release, May 16, 2006. Also in Marketing Vox. Verbatim highlights from press release:

The Players research found that 25% of Gamers are Heavy Gamers, playing 16 or more hours per week across any gaming platform, or playing 11 hours or more per week and playing on two or more platforms.

Light/Medium Gamers -- those that play less than 16 hours per week on one platform -- represent 75 percent of Gamers.

Approximately 17 percent of Gamers are in the hard-to-reach age group of 18-24 years old, while another 23% are in the advertising sweet-spot age segment aged 35 to 44 years old. One-in-five (20 percent) have an annual income over $75,000 per year, and the typical Gamer has been gaming for about 9 years, and has been online for about 8 years.

Gamers are equally split along gender lines.

More than 50 percent of Heavy Gamers and one-third of Light/Medium Gamers are at least somewhat familiar with the concept of in-game advertising.

Specifically, when asked about their attitudes towards games with advertisements, only 15 percent of Heavy Gamers claimed they would be "unlikely" to play games that included such product placements. In contrast, more than twice as many Heavy Gamers (33 percent), said they would be "likely" to play those games, while fully 52% of Heavy Gamers and 56% of Light/Medium Gamers stated that the inclusion of advertising would have no impact on their likelihood of playing a game.

The Players study is conducted using comScore's unique dual-mode methodology that combines passively observed online behavior and attitudinal information for the same consumers. Wave I of the survey portion of the Players Study collected attitudinal information from 800 Gamers from February 13 - 27, 2006. Additional waves will be fielded throughout 2006.

US Army Brands Gamespot

Branded background, an interstitial and banners (linking to this site) for the US Army on Gamespot.com.

News: Advertisers Ramp Up Presence at E3

"Does E3 Amount to a Video Game Upfront?", Zachary Rodgers, May 10, 2006, Clickz.com

"Brands and their agencies are all over E3 this year, and they've booked wall-to-wall meetings with ad sales execs at the game studios and with the in-game ad firms that represent their games."

News: Contextual Ads in Adult Games for PSP

"UnWired Brings Erotic Games, Product Placement to PSP", Todd Lewis, 2005-11-17, AVN Online.

"Mobile content and delivery specialist UnWired is developing a series of downloadable erotic games for Sony’s PlayStation Portable. The products will feature adult stars, and the company hopes to delve further into adult product placement vehicles in the future.

These games will be innovative in the sense that if the gamer plays online using the Wi-Fi capability of the machine, he will be able to see advertising on billboards, clips on a TV screen, read magazine articles, and see a different logo on a character’s T-shirt throughout the game. He can automatically get directed into any predefined website through the game. These parts will be dynamically updated in the game itself while the user is playing."

- Screenshots (not safe for work)
- Write-up on Fleshbot

Exent's Tech Places Ads in Old, Pirated Games

I'm not sure how exactly this works, but there's a new player on the in-game advertising field - Exent Technologies - that claims its technology can put ads in the games that are already on the market through either legitimate or pirate channels. Some bits from the press release:

• The solution allows for the enablement of in-game ads without the need to access the video game's source code or any SDK integration.
• Exent provides, through its patent-pending technology, the only solution that allows publishers to easily add in-game advertising capabilities at any stage of the product life cycle - during development, post-production and even after the games have been deployed and installed on users' machines.
• Apply in-game advertising for games that were never equipped to have it enabled, even for games already purchased and used by consumers.
• Identify pirated copies and create campaigns to salvage revenues from them, no matter how old the title is and when it is cracked.