Adventures In Digital Marketing

Today I had a meeting with Tom Hosking, Media Director, and Chris James, Head of UK, from IGA Worldwide, a relatively new In-Game advertising company that I blogged about in September this year after they struck a landmark deal with EA to include dynamic ad serving in several of their upcoming PC and Xbox 360 titles.

In-Game is something i’m very interested in as a way forward, and although it doesn’t have too much in common with the majority of stuff I(we?) tend to do online, in terms of direct response style marketing, it’s digital none-the-less and so something I think worth investigating.  Also, I used to work in games a looooong time ago, so have a bit of a soft spot for the industry.

The following is a bit of a write up of the discussion we had around in-game…

Static vs Dynamic

There are basically two types of in-game advertising available at the moment.  Static ads, and dynamic ads.

A static ad is basically what happens when a game is distributed to the gamer in isolation from the internet, and runs with a pre-configured set of content/ads which will never be changed or altered - they’re fixed into the game DVD disc and won’t change, regardless of whether the user logs onto their broadband connection in the future or not.  Generally these are handled by IGA’s sister company, Hive.

Dynamic ads on the other hand are much more interesting (certainly to me).  These are based in systems that rely on an internet connection for their content, generally speaking a broadband connection.  They can be targeted to different territories as and when required, used in fixed periods of time, set to launch at specific periods, and removed when required. Games with dynamic ads can change what they display at the bequest of the media agency or client that decides to advertise within the game, in exactly the same way that a web site will display different banners or other OLM on it’s site at any time.  In fact, in many ways, it’s the same business model as the banner buying side of things.

IGA the company

grown from 4 people a year ago to 12 at the moment in the UK office.  Have three locations in the US, in California, Texas and New York, with another office in Berlin, as well as London.  Rapidly growing at present.

How does it work?

In-game advertising of the dynamic kind, with IGA, used a bespoke Software Development Kit (SDK) which they give to the game developers to be included in their titles - kind of "a programme within a programme" to quote Tom from our meeting.  When the game is loaded onto the PC or games console, the SDK connects to the Internet over the users broadband connection and talks to the IGA servers in the USA to grab that latest content, and share back the information it has gathered since the last time it connected.

A users location is decided upon by the IP address they connect with, and from this IGA can work out where they are based in the world.  Relevant content is then delivered over to the PC or console and stored in memory until it is required.  The dynamic content isn’t delivered to the game in real-time, but is more delivered in bulk in advance of when it is required.  So a campaign that goes live on wednesday, could be delivered in advance on Monday and only shown when the time and date are right.  The same as with banners and any other media.

What platforms are supported?

At the moment IGA serve mainly the PC market.  Talks are on-going with Microsoft in regards to the Xbox 360, but at the moment this is only served by a competitor, Massive, who are also owned by Microsoft.  This is due to change.

The arrival of the Sony PS3 on the scene at any moment will likely change things a great deal, especially as all of them are network ready and come with a hard drive.What Nintendo plan to do in this space is unknown at this point.

As well as major PC and console games, IGA also mentioned what are called "casual games".  These are the kind of thing you find on Yahoo! or Popcap, flash based online games you generally play in a browser.

IGA are also talking to Second Life about ads, but at the moment SL is a free for all with no restrictions apart from how much "land" you can afford to buy.

How do you buy this kind of space?

At the moment IGA work with both clients directly, as well as working through more traditional media agencies for buying/selling space.  As a rough rule of thumb, static ads are done directly with clients, whilst dynamic ads are generally sold via media agencies.

How is success reported?

As with banners and other OLM, in-game ads are impressions based, as in each time a user is displayed an ad, an impression is recorded, regardless of how it was received or interacted with.  You buy a number of impressions, such as 1,000, and when they’re gone, the ad is removed.

Unlike banners however, there are some factors taken into consideration in what an impression actually consists of.  Basically, if an ad is shown on screen for at least 2 seconds, and covering at least 1/25th of the screen area, it registers as an impression.  Any less time or smaller area, and it doesn’t count.

By doing this, the odds are that they over deliver, but who’s counting

What’s important to remember?

It’s important to get the creative concept in front of IGA, the publisher, and the client as early as possible (when isn’t it!) because any one of them, particularly the publisher, can pull the plug if the creative isn’t relative to the game, which can stop the whole process in it’s tracks.

The publisher seems to have final say - period!

Remember that unlike banners, where you may be trying to sell something to an audience that isn’t directly related to the page content (cars to a lads mag audience for example), in-game ads need to be very closely related to, or at least extremely relevant to, the actual content and structure of the game in question.  A game featuring fluffy kittens aimed at kids isn’t going to sit well with ads for alcohol, whilst a game featuring lots of violence and fighting might not necessarily be applicable for a brand not willing to take that gamble.  Whilst the audience might be the right target market, if the content and the ad don’t match up, it simply won’t work.  These ads are inside the editorial content, not sitting along side it.

Can we show videos?

At the moment IGA have decided not to allow video ads in games, because most of the time it detracts from the gameplay of the game itself, and that’s a BIG no no. Nothing worse than standing watching a video and being shot in the head whilst doing it!

How much?

Well, it’s similar in cost to online such as banners but much cheaper than TV, and is sold on a per impression basis. A rule of thumb is approx £25 per 1,000.

In terms of where the money goes, generally the split can range between 60/40 IGA/publisher, to 30/70 IGA/publisher.  It all depends on the title and the deal.

Howard

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• The Venice Project
  The guys who brought you SKype go for broke with a web based TV service in a peer-to-peer style.
  (tags: peer-to-peer tv television ip web-based video p2p social startup skype sharing)

Kazaa and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis have started a new venture entitled The Venice project.

Keeping relatively quiet about it so far, their web site states that they are "…working on a project that combines the best things about
television with the social power of the internet - a project that gives
viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and
creativity than ever before."

Still in a limited beta mode (hey, it’s web2.0 - it’ll always be in beta right?) the system is apparently to be a downloadable application which will deliver near TV quality programming over the internet to you, in return for around 1 megabit per second in bandwidth.

More information about the new venture was offered out via an interview with Om Malik, where Friis added "We are building an ad-based system, and it is close to the television
model. We will do revenue share with the content providers. With our
system, people can be targeted with the right kind of ads. We are
respecting the copyrights."

So, as the collapse of boundaries between platforms continues we see that on one hand, the audience truly does to fragment more and more - one of the big concerns with digital that most marketers have at the moment - but with this service it looks like the Skype boys could strike it lucky.

There could well be two models for content distribution in the future - directly paid for content, be it over iTunes, satellite TV, cable or the Internet, and free-to-view content, paid for indirectly by advertising.  The choice will be down to the user - pay and get rid of the ads, or watch for free and put up with ads.

No matter how much I love the Internet and this industry in which we work, I also love my TV, and this post on techcrunch sums up a lot of my feelings about this new concept… "If Niklas and Janus have been successful in securing rights to network
shows, we’re about to be introduced to something which is very likely
to result in me cancelling my cable television subscription once and
for all."  What do the TV companies care if their stuff is delivered over the web or over a cable/dish?  it’s the same for them - all they care about is the ad cash!

We’ll be keeping our eyes on Venice for some time to come no doubt, but just a thought…

…perhaps this gives hope to those out there who are hanging on for dear life to the traditional, above-the-line 30-second tv or cinema clip, by giving them access to the advanced tools we on the digital side take for granted nowadays (tagging, targetting, 1-2-1 communications, etc.) whilst keeping, to a certain extent, their broadcast techniques in the frame for a while longer?

Howard

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Link: Nivi : Greasemonkey will blow up business models (as well as your mind).

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets users add “user scripts” (DHTML, technically) to any web page. These scripts can change any aspect of a web page’s behaviour, interaction, or design. This little baby is going to blow up business models.

Greasemonkey can insert prices from competitive booksellers right into Amazon.

Greasemonkey can put links to BitTorrent movies inside
Netflix or Amazon.

Greasemonkey lets you mash-up websites. It lets you extend and script websites and integrate that script right into the original site as if the designers had intended it to be there. It lets you use their web site, their data, their servers, their work to serve your purpose and function. There will soon be an army of hackers enhancing every site you use. Whether that site likes it or not.

 

Calling themselves the "World’s first new marketing company" a new multinational agency called Crayon has held a launch event to announce their arrival in both real life and Second Life simultaneously.

Stating in their press release, Crayon founder Joseph Jaffe (author of Life After the 30-second Spot), claims "The world has changed, but marketing, advertising, and public
relations have not,… There is no question that
the influence organizations can achieve through traditional marketing,
advertising and PR is fading fast."

Using their new Second Life office as the global operations hub, and running in the real world out of Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, California and England (small place that England is of course -why do Americans always do that?!), Crayon will focus on providing their clients with services revolving around what they have decided to call "new marketing" including blogs, podcasts, RSS and wikis, experiential marketing, long form
content, consumer generated content, open-source marketing, virtual
worlds, gaming, mobile, and non-paid media digital solutions.

Slightly dodgy title aside (I mean, come on! Haven’t we spent the last ten years trying to get "traditional" people to take us on board as digital marketing rather than "new media" and accept us as a real part of the marketing mix without adding "new marketing" into the fold as well?) I suppose this does highlight the fact that a lot of what we’re working with now as digital marketers really hasn’t been done before - and the whole paradigm shift from broadcast, to request, is the exciting thing - and it looks like Crayon know this.

Crayon can be found on the web (apparently so 2005!) at http://www.crayonville.com/ and in second life on an island of the same name, crayonville.  Their press release can be found here.

Howard

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As with many processes in this business, using Altova Authentic as an extra step in your localisation process for Flash can sometimes seem like a drag when you first start.

There’s a lot more work to do than just cutting and pasting into a document you might think.  You have to get developer resource to initially learn how to work with it, adapt to some of the Authentic specific XML tags and so forth – and all that takes time and money.

Then there’s the time required to prepare the XML document each time you do a new project, and this again takes time to do.

Not to forget that you need to prepare the local “Altova packages” that I mentioned, the little .zip files containing the XML documents as well as a full version of the original language version of the site to distribute to the translators. That takes time as well!

All of this does add up, I agree.  But the benefits of front-loading all of this into your process and timeline reduce the risk and effort involved in moving MS Word document around or allowing direct XML source access to translators that it will completely and utterly pay for itself, in so many ways, from the very first time you use it.

You could write your own tool to do this, and I have done that as well in several different ways.  But for small jobs, jobs that generally don’t have the budget for tools development, using the method I have described is a great way to bring in a CMS style process, with the control and flexibility that it provides, to all of your Flash work where you need to translate copy using 3rd parties.

Howard
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As well as allowing you to give translators direct access to the XML document without the need for technical skills, the Altova Authentic method that I have begun to use allows you to deliver to the translators what I refer to as “an Altova package” (I made this name up, it’s nothing to do with Altova I don’t think). 

What I mean by this is that at the bare minimum, all you really need to give to the translator is the XML file you want them to adapt, and a few other XML/XSL type documents which help Authentic know how to display the content.  But this is only half the job in a way.

When doing localisation, one of the key things to remember at all stages, especially during the design of a product, is that English is probably one of the shortest written languages in the world.  It’s tiny by comparison to many.  German, Swedish and French, for example, often come in at well over 1.5 to 2 times as long as English when translated, and what this means is if you have a restrictive design or template for your Flash work, quite often copy will “spill over” the designated area for it, and make the site unusable and unsightly. 

Whilst you can always make allowances for this during the design phase, some things will often slip through the net.  What you don’t want, therefore, is the translators merrily going about their job with no regard for the amount of space they have to work with.  If all you were to do was provide them with the XML documents to work with in Authentic, this is effectively what they would be doing – translating blind.

There is a way to get around this however. Because your Flash document works from XML, rather than any server-side scripting like ASP.net, you can run the Flash, to a certain extent, from the harddrive directly without the need for a web server (there are a few limitations to this, such as linking to external URLs, due to the security within Flash itself, but these are minor problems compared to the massive benefits this technique brings).  Because of this, when you deliver the XML documents to the translator, you can also include a local, full copy of the English version of the product at the same time.  I normally do this as a nice, compact .zip file which they can just unzip to their own computer and off they go. 

This means that as the translator is converting to their own language, they can preview their work in real-time in a web browser and see exactly how their words will look when placed online.  By doing this, you give them the ability to make copy as long or short as required to fit the space available and flow nicely.  For me, this was a huge step and meant that a further round of amendments was not required once the XML was received back and the project published to a staging environment – effectively each and every translator had their own mini-staging server on their own harddrive as they were working – perfect!

Of course, this means that in your Flash development process you have to ensure that you have the local language version, in my case English, ready well before you want the translated copy back for you to go live.  If you’re on a tight timeline (and who isn’t!) and you don’t have the luxury of being able to wait two weeks for translations to come back (trust me, two weeks is about minimum the amount of time you need to give people) then this can sound like a problem.  I assure you though, by using this method, by giving translators direct access to the XML documents and placing their words straight into the place where they need to be, you will so drastically reduce the amount of work that you and your team will have to do later on, as well as improving the accuracy of your translations, that this process pays for itself time and time again.

Howard
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Line Rider is a cross between a game, a toy and a drawing tool. It’s gotten 6,000,000 views since it was posted a month ago.

The easiest way to figure out what it is is to watch a video of other people’s tracks on YouTube; it’s just incredible to see how much can be done with simple lines and a clever physics engine.

The funny thing is how much this reminds me of those Red Bull ads. In fact this is much better than the Red Bull ads.

jm

Techcrunch breaks another “scoop” that Digg may be in acquisition talks but it could end up being a 2nd round of funding. The number being thrown around is a minimum of $150 million.  That’s a lot of cash when you consider the rumoured revenue of about $3 million per year.

Altova Authentic is basically an XML editor.  In many ways it’s similar to XMLSpy but with one key difference.  That difference is that it includes a web browser-style interface within it that lets you display XML on a page as actual content, removed from the underlying XML structure in which it really sits.  No need, if you don’t want to, to look at the raw code underneath.

More important than that fact alone, however, is that by using XSLT to enhance the original XML content you want to work with, you can get Altova to make the content, NOT the XML structure itself, editable – in a way that is like using Microsite Word, or filling in form fields on a web site.

In this way, it’s entirely possible to give non-technical users access to complex XML files for the editing, re-writing, translating and cutting-and-pasting of all of the text content that is contained within a document, without the need for them to ever, ever, touch the actual raw XML document itself, as they would do if they were using a text editor such as TextPad.

By using Altova Authentic therefore, it’s possible to give the translator, whoever that may be, direct access to the XML document itself and enter their localised copy straight into the code, but you completely remove the risk of them messing up the structure of the document because they will never see it.

All that is required of them is to download the free Authentic application from the Internet and install it onto their machines.  A few Authentic specific XML commands at the top of the document is all that is required to prepare it for use in the tool, and you can get one of your own developers to do that for you.

No more cut-and-paste.  No more guessing where that particularly strange looking piece of Turkish copy is supposed to go.  All of that is handled for you by the very person who is doing the translation, so you can effectively sit back and relax and wait for the amended files to return to your inbox complete, localised and ready to drop into the Flash.

Howard
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