An Insider Look into Video Game Ad Sales
By Andrew on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 1:22 AM PST In Gamer Life, Games Industry
You are a target market. But to just what extent do we let ourselves be marketed?
Massive Inc. just might have the answer to that question.
“It first and foremost has to fit within the context of the game, if it doesn’t, it just sticks out like a sore thumb and the gaming community just rakes you over the coals for being a bunch of idiots,” Cory Van Arsdale, CEO of Massive, Inc., told ReportonBusiness.com. “If you’re enhancing the user’s environment, you’re enhancing the value of the medium in terms of reaching that user.”
Van Arsdale heads Massive Inc., one of the firms which handles video game ad sales, which was purchased last year by Microsoft. The firm helps handle the niche market of advertising opportunity with care, and it’s obvious that there’s a balance which they realize needs to be reached, which I wrote about last week. And this type of firm is most likely going to become more and more common as time goes on.
According to the ReportonBusiness.com article, Nielsen will begin tracking in-game advertising number this year, and more than half of gamers play online at least some of the time. Massive Inc. can tell businesses buying time exactly how long gamers will spend looking at the ad, and time is sold in ten second increments called an “impression.”
So far, more than 50 games are already receiving dynamic ad content from the firm, and 70 more are set to go by the end of the year. In comparison with television, Massive Inc.’s impressions of the 18-34 demographic are reaching that of a small cable channel.
