In-game advertising is fast overtaking television and print as a key promotional medium, and as Helen Fletcher finds out, marketers specifically targeting a core audience of 17 to 35-year-olds will soon find themselves shifting advertising budgets away from television in favour of online channels...

Games are part of everyday media culture, used intensively above all by male adolescents up to the age of 30. The current generation of parents around the age of 40 have also grown up with video and computer games, and depending on the type of gamer, games now account for 20 to 180 minutes of daily media usage.

The most common type of gamer, according to a report presented by Phil Newald of Tipp3, at this year’s BetMarkets conference, is the leisure-time gamer, which represents 54 per cent of gamers - the remaining numbers are made up of habitual, reflective, fantasy and intensive gamers. Games have, without question, become a fixed part of our daily life and have gained a fixed percentage of our media-usage time.

"Behaviour on media-usage is changing dramatically especially within the group of 17 to 35-year-olds," said Alfred Hofer of Greentube. "Television will begin to see an increasing loss of audience within the next 10 years and games are providing a general base of emotionalised background for advertising and sponsoring.

"Marketers specifically targeting early adopters and a core audience within this age group will have to shift major budgets from television to online and games. In-game advertising (IGA) is growing an average of 40 to 60 per cent a year.

"Casual games are a perfect platform for mass marketing as our customers already have a 50 per cent male/50 per cent female ratio," Hofer continued. "Emotional involvement and stickyness are higher compared to classic communication channels and the success rate of campaigns can be measured directly."

Greentube’s 3D games are fully financed with IGA and its media partners purchase exclusive country-licences, which come with numerous benefits including: additional revenue with IGA sales, increased traffic on websites, image transfers and increased stickyness. Greentube’s sponsorship partners, which include Audi, Red Bull, Visa, Siemens, Telenor, Samsung and Canon to name a few, get detailed statistics on their advertising value generated with the game.

Early examples of IGA were static and first seen in the computer game Adventureland in 1978, designed by Scott Adams, who inserted an advert for his then forthcoming game Pirate Adventure. As expected, technology has moved things on slightly and there are now several IGA possibilities available to companies, including: Adgames, which are produced on behalf of the advertiser and distributed on date carriers or online; Add-on’s, which are an extension of existing computer games through additional modules; Dynamic IGA, which is the temporary incorporation of advertising in games and the possibility of subject change through an online link; and Virtual worlds/Metaverses, which involves the interactive presence of a brand in a virtual reality such as Second Life.

"The technology behind IGA provides high opportunities in terms of one-to-one marketing and behavioural approaches," said Hofer. "Nevertheless games have already become a mass-audience factor attracting more and more big budgets and mass campaigns."

"We have seen a major shift on IGA in our free casual 3D games. A couple of years ago, we would have had to pay a car manufacturer money for putting their car model into our racing game. Nowadays it is the other way around with car manufacturers paying us for putting their car models into the game."

However, as with all advertising the kind of format a company opts for is dependant on the content in which it will be held and certain types of games lend themselves to advertising better than others.

According to a survey of 105 marketing decision makers, carried out by Tipp3, virtual worlds such as Second Life, strategy and sport games such as Football Manager and racing games, are most suitable for placing adverts.

"Formats do have to be adopted to the nature of the games and portals," said Hofer. "For example the advertisement within our sport game is neither static nor bound to a certain format. We have also started to develop new ad-formats such as streaming ads that fit into our browser based games."

However, as it is still a relatively new advertising medium there are some reservations from companies regarding the effectiveness of IGA, with the main concerns being that there is no reach currency verified by a neutral body and there is no response data and or experience. Some gamers also see the incorporation of advertising as greedy and invasive with some dubbing IGA software as ‘spyware’.

As far as the future of IGA goes, Hofer sees that "highly sophisticated and targeted mass campaigns will become the future and that international games and platforms will start to attract bigger international budgets."

Online IGA is, as noted by Newald, an indispensable medial channel, above all, to reach young, male target groups up to the age of 30 and it will become an element of virtual game worlds that is readily accepted by gamers and that keeps selling and downloading prices of games at a moderate level.