Adventures In Digital Marketing

Wii fit seems like yet another great wii game. It comes with a body mass index scales and lots of yoga, tai chi and core training type goodness. I am going to order mine today!

Jonathan

I am impressed by the number of videos streamed in the background of this site:
http://www.thebourneultimatum.com/

It makes for an engaging web experience, especially as they have excerpts from the next book, the movie and a mobile game. It would be easy to see this as a movie, video game crossover that pushes the cross media platform boundaries even further.

Jonathan

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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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

Link: Online gambling | Busted flush | Economist.com.

For the past 2 months + I have been working for Endemol Gaming and so I have been following closely the incredible developments in the Gaming world  over this period. The new American legislation has had an incredible effect on UK based Internet Poker companies who are no longer flush with so much cash:

"One of the more ironic consequences of the new law is that it may have made British-based online gambling companies vulnerable to takeover by America’s casino groups. Not only have the firms’ share prices fallen heavily, but their withdrawal from the United States has legitimised them as prey to American operators seeking to quickly obtain online expertise and knowledge of overseas markets."

Quite a few news sites (as well as bloggers) are reporting that EA has at last signed deals with two leading in-game ad companies, Microsoft’s Massive and IGA Partners, that will allow real-time in-game ads to be downloaded into at least four of it’s upcoming titles, intially launching on an upcoming Need For Speed and Battlefield games.

This is something that’s been on the buzz for quite some time and I have to say it is of particular interest to me having worked in games in the past, and now, ten years on, finally seeing the two worlds begin to combine.

The deal covers only the PC and XBOX platforms, so nothing for Sony or Nintendo gamers yet, presumably meaning that any ads in games on those platforms will remain the static variety rather than anything done in real time.

I can’t find any detail on how these ads will be targetted above and beyond a sweeping demographic stab at the game’s target audience, and I would be very keen to hear from anyone who knows more if there is even an option to do things "on the fly".  That would really revoutionary to target not just real-time ads to gamers, but to target different ones to different people.  As this is a global deal, presumably at least there will be localisation for country specific content rather than just using global brands.

This moves the concept of outdoor style ads into a whole different realm.  Unlike online advertising which is usually accompanied by a click-thru call to action, these ads will be driven past at high speed, certainly for Need For Speed, so it seems unlikely to me that the user is going interact with the ad in any way.

I’ll be watching this with a keen eye as this is something I am really interested in getting my teeth into as well as I have a few ideas up my sleeve I’d like to try (and go beyond a simple banner as well!)

Howard
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Google have launched a new tool which aims to help them improve their search listings when it comes to images.

The Google Image Labeller is a web based game, or sorts, which allows an individual user to partner up with another person on the site and suggest keywords, or labels, for images which appear to them on screen at random.

The idea is that your keywords help google identify what the image contains and thus improve the accuracy of their search results.  Keywords are only added to an image if both of the users match the same word, to make sure you’re not doing something stupid and logging the wrong keywords.

I gave this a go just now and it’s actually strangely compelling, and I found myself entering words at a speed of knots to see if I could match my online partners.  Unfortunately my partners didn’t seem quite so fast and I hardly matched any words, except for when an image was really obvious, such as one which showed a footballer.

This is really interesting to me, having previously worked at an image library, as keywording was one of the things we always found hard to do and get right - in fact in the image library world it really is quite a big topic as hard as that might actually be believed.  There are firms that specialise in nothing else but keywording images. 

Opening them up to the users of the site is a really interesting thing, and I am sure the big players in the library world like Corbis and Getty could take a good look at this method for their own libraries.

Howard
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