It's been a month since my last post here, and it was a month spent on getting some (very little) actual writing done, and on working on other unrelated projects. Now that the thesis presentation is a week away and the defence is on May 5, it's crunch time.
Anyway, I went to the
Advertising in Games conference in NYC on Wednesday, thinking I would pick up interesting stuff for my work (special thanks to the organizers for giving me the press pass in recognition of my blog publishing career). As it usually happens, the event was rich in networking and less rich on unique content, but below are a few shots of the most interesting presentations (taking snapshots of the screen is much easier than writing the things down).
Massive showed off their work for
True Crime: New York City for PC. This is a billboard for Navy on the game's Times Square. Somewhat bizzare, considering the violent nature of the game, but then the target audience must be right - boys with lots of built-up testosterone and an urge to break things.
Speaking of boys, most of the games are purchased by women (moms) for boys, says NPD.
NDP said their studies show that while most of the games are purchased for boys (males), there is a lot of pass-over secondary audience in different demos once the game arrives at home.
Some usage studies from Nielsen. Turns out Hispanics are the biggest spenders when it comes to games ($56.1 a month). In other news, on average gamers play 7.8 times a week (that is, more than once a day) to the tune of 12 hours total a week.
Nielsen also says that in the male 18-34 demographic, games beat some networks for prime-time viewership.
Some big revenue estimates were thrown around. Massive quotes Jupiter saying that revenue from in-game advertising will reach $1 billion by 2010. According to Nielsen, the revenue will reach $2.5 billion by 2013. I missed it, but apparently Mitch Davis said that "in-game ad spending would land somewhere between $1.6 billion and $1.8 billion in the U.S. by 2010, accounting for roughly 3 percent of total media spending" (
Ad Week).
Some of the publishers in the Massive's network.
Other industry stats (can't tell from whose presentation): gamers spend, on average, 41.7 hours playing a game they last purchased (ESA 2005). Also, 94% of American Consumers aged 12-21 own a gaming device, according to Forrester (don't know whether all those dusty NES consoles in the closets count).
NPD made an interesting point that in-game advertising will become an increasingly attractive source of revenue for publishers given the flat game sales for the past few years.
A very useful chart tracking install base for the current generation of console devices. Again, you'll see that a lot of devices are used by more than one person.
Massive also said they now were capable of geotargeting and displaying ads in different languages depending on players' locations. A recent example was a European promo for
V for Vendetta.
