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Study Indicates In-Game Ads Actually Work
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jul 23, 2007 05:57 PM
from the subliminal-videogaming dept.
from the subliminal-videogaming dept.
The Next Generation site is running a piece discussing new findings about in-game advertising. The results of collaboration between an ad firm and a research company show that ads in games are actually having an effect on players. Double Fusion's involvement in the study throws the results into question. Take these statistics with a grain of salt: "75% of gamers engage with at least one ad per minute across most, but not all, game types; 81% of gamers engage at least every other minute. Less-cluttered ads are three times as effective at garnering gamer notice than ads that are either cluttered or within cluttered environments. While both contribute positively to ad engagement, placement of the ad in the primary camera plane (eye-level) is more important than large size ads. Not all ads are created equal - dynamic billboards, around-game interstitials, sponsorships, and interactive product placements all offer different levels of user engagement and pervasiveness in the game" Eidos certainly thinks so; Kotaku notes that they've signed up with the same company featured in this study.
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In-Game Ads Make Products More Appealing 82 comments
Opposable Thumbs has the gist of a report indicating that in-game ads really are successful at increasing consumer interest in a product. "In a study that began in 2004 and included 600 gamers, gaming-advertisement firm Massive Inc.--a subsidiary of Microsoft--found that in-game advertising increased average brand familiarity as much as 64 percent. The study included two groups: a control group and a test group. Both played Need for Speed: Carbon, but only the test group was exposed to ads from Massive Inc. The study showed a 69 percent increase in automotive purchase consideration between the test and control groups made up of men between 18 and 24. The respondents also indicated that 'quick service restaurant' brands were 'cool' because they were advertised in games ('cool' is left undefined)."
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Engagement... (Score:5, Interesting)
And it goes on.
So my question: How does this justify calling them "effective"?
I realize that marketing thinks that no PR is bad PR, but in the real world, I'm not convinced. That gamer might be "engaging" with that particular ad by firing rockets at it, "teabagging" it, or otherwise using it to vent their rage at that particular product, or at the very idea of sticking an ad in the middle of a game.
But seriously, I want everyone to go back and think about those "Punch the monkey and win!" web ads from the 90's. Do you even remember what it was an ad for? What about the popups for... some Internet camera? It's certainly not going to make me go out of my way to buy the product. It MAY make me subconsciously more likely to notice the product. But if it ever gets conscious -- if I ever see a physical product, for example, and remember it having something to do with "punch the monkey" -- I'll probably punch the product. Maybe physically -- right there on the supermarket shelf.
In other words -- I strongly suspect the lighter ads are much more likely to be things we'd want to buy. If you create a giant, animated, flashing billboard and stick it in the middle of a medieval dungeon, then no, that's where I take the game back to the store, claim it "wouldn't work on my computer", and ask for my money back.
In another study, parents are more likely to "engage" with children who say "Are we there yet?" every five seconds than children who shut the fuck up and look out the window.
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I can honestly say that the "Will It Blend" people would be totally open to sponsoring a game development initiative where one of the bosses was a big blender monster that constantly screamed "WILL YOU BLEND!"
The trick is to advertise in a self depreciating manner. If you know that players might respond negatively to your ads being all over a game, you could easily attempt to have an element of the game be created for purposeful abuse that had y
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Lipton's... (Score:2)
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Product recognition... which brands do you recognize... this leads to comfort and purchases when there are two competing products.
Misplaced quality belief... when you see Tide vs No-Name which makes better detergent?
These things are produced with advertising, not with customer education... that is marketing effectiveness and yes it's totally fking evil.
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What I don't get is why they think it's effective. For example:
If I don't care (and I don't), then whichever is cheaper. If I do care, then whichever actually performs better. If I don't have the time to test myself, I go read Consumer's Reports.
I'm unusual, I know, but I really have to wonder if anyone actually consciously says "Oh, that's Tide, it must be better."
I must be new here... (Score:2)
I guess I just don't get how making someone aware of your brand or product makes you any money at all, unless someone buys it. And didn't we learn that lesson from popup ads? Pissing your customers off is generally not a good way to ma
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I guess I just don't get how making someone aware of your brand or product makes you any money at all, unless someone buys it.
Because we live more and more in an attention economy [wikipedia.org], and public awareness makes money all by itself - you can make economic deals with stronger enterprises if your business is "emergent", specially if it sells shares in the stock market.
This "frozen attention" can be capitalized (or monetized) later in a myriad ways, even selling products other than the originally advertised one.
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Which means if I was looking to buy an "emergent" business, I'd look for one which both has attention and doesn't annoy people to the point where they boycott my brand.
For example: If you're a geek, would you knowingly buy ANYTHING to do with AOL, if you had any other choice? What about BonziBuddy? Seems to me that putting the AOL brand on anything is guaranteed to get
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You also place a disproportionate amount of focus on ads you were turned off by. Okay, so Pepsi didn't win your vote, but if you're human, an ad has created a positive association in your mind between a brand and an ad you liked.
Branding works. Coke and Pepsi succeed *because* of their advertising, not in spite of it. Re
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Again, assuming I liked the ad.
Right. But again, I don't see how it's good for BonziBuddy for me to remember their name, because I won't even use their free stuff (they are spyware), and the only way I'd even mention the name to someone else is to say that
Does it matter if they're right? (Score:4, Insightful)
All I really care about is the pervasiveness of ads in games, and from that standpoint the veracity of these numbers is much less important than what the people putting them in games think. And I'm not convinced that even if a dozen studies came out saying in-game ads don't work that they'd actually stop. There's a lot of vested interest in putting ads in games, and while they will surely embrace this study, they'd probably be highly skeptical of a study that said the opposite. How many studies have shown that people tend to completely ignore web-based ads, not even registering their existence a lot of the time? And are there less web-based ads? No, because the reality is that they probably do work overall, and certainly the people putting ads on websites aren't going to take the risk of stopping.
Which I guess makes my only point "more ads are coming regardless of what studies say".
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How many studies have shown that people tend to completely ignore web-based ads, not even registering their existence a lot of the time? And are there less web-based ads? No, because the reality is that they probably do work overall, and certainly the people putting ads on websites aren't going to take the risk of stopping.
Everyone playing the game knows the score. Web ads don't work if you don't do your due diligence. Certain demographics respond differently to web ads. Techies hate shotgun ads, the less enlightened really love them. B2B ads perform much better than B2C ads, if only because business people are actively searching for an answer to a problem while organic results give consumers the references they need.
I've never heard anyone complain about an ad they liked. Just ads that weren't relevant.
And Does It Matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
When I play games, I notice the ads. How can you not? When my secret agent runs head first into a Comcast van, how does one not notice?
So yes, I have no doubt that 81% of players or whatever notice their insipid ads. The question is, do gamers care, and are they more likely to purchase an advertiser's service due to the ad? There is such a thing as bad publicity.
Personally I've never made a buying decision off an ad in a game. In fact, they annoy me, and when I see the product/brand in real life I am reminded of that annoyance. I would say I'm *less* likely to choose a product over its competitor because of the annoyance it has caused me while I'm trying to relax.
Secondly, are in-game ads really worth it for game developers? My ire towards in-game ads are less directed at the advertisers than the game companies responsible for producing the mess in the first place. My opinion of EA and Ubisoft is decreasing very rapidly due to their rampant participation in this money grab. I am less likely to purchase their games, and in fact I have stopped purchasing EA games completely as a matter of principle. How much are advertisers giving them, and does it balance out with loss of customers like myself?
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I agree. I always do my research for large purchases, but for a bottle of hand soap I certainly don't spend hours going over studies and papers and whatnot. That being said, I do feel a negative response when I see products that have been advertised to me in an extremely annoying manner, whether it's through flashing banners on the Internet, in-game ads, or merely a poorly conceived ad that annoys me to no end every time I see it on TV. For small products that don't need research, and where I am faced with
Didn't include all metrics (Score:3, Insightful)
They should compare these ads to just flashing random brightly colored crap on the screen, and see which one gets more "engagement".
I can't recall ever seeing any ads.. (Score:3, Informative)
Battlefield 2142: (Score:2, Informative)
What exactly is engaging? (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:2)
Games with ads should be FREE (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not to mention the game itself...
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In handle advertising does work (Score:2)
No good will come of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly constitutes exposure to advertising? Let's take any EA game plastered with marketing crap. Even menu screens are promoting one product for another. Let's take one of the FIFA games. I decide I want to customize my players so I spend a few minutes equipping my players with some sneakers. Those sneakers happen to be Adidas or Nike sneakers. Does this count as exposure? Suppose I'm camping a spot in an FPS and there just so happens to be a billboard facing my direction. Does that count as exposure?
The point is that the marketing company could care less. What they want are metrics that look good. They don't care how effective the marketing actually is, nor is there any real way of knowing. But on paper it looks good and so developers fall for it. Not that they care, because it's extra advertising income for them.
I find this particularly troubling. Does this mean we're going to get less realistic environments? We can't have overly detailed environments if there's a risk of advertising blending into the background. I predict, however, we're going to end up with the gaming equivalent of pop up banners. Advertisers will just have these big crap banners floating around in mid air. And I expect the quality of these ads to be utter crap. In all the years of advertising on the web 95% of it still looks like garbage. We're going to be stuck with LowerMyBills banners in our games.
I also think it's naive to think that the cost of our games will drop once advertising is introduced. Developers and publishers aren't looking to introduce advertising in order to make the same amount of money they make now. This will be like cable and satellite television. You'll pay as much, if not more than you pay now AND you get the added bonus of advertising. Advertising will only become more intrusive and unlike browsers there will be no way to block any of it. And lets not forget that our games are going to be sanitized and inoffensive, in order to appease advertisers. And games will be compromised in order to appeal to desired demographics.
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It couldn't come soon enough.
They work great! (Score:2)
Since you publisher-fellows have obviously chosen to make your revenue via an alternative method, I'm sure you won't mind that I refuse to pay for your games that have ads in them.
Thanks! They really do work!
Some in-game ads are just useless... (Score:3, Informative)
The uselessness of it is that if you're not in the US, wtf is Helio? I can't buy a Helio phone here in Canada, and I'm sure, neither can anyone else outside of the US. Sure the largest market will understand it, but it sure will date itself quick when the phones they advertise is gone. The only reason I know who Helio is was from the million posts on sites like Gizmodo. So no matter how much "eye time" Helio gets, it's for naught...
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Damn. And I was so looking forward to playing it, since it's the only way I'll get to hear Frank Welker as Megatron.
Don't like it? They'll go somewhere else... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you honestly hate in-game advertising so much that you stop buying games with it, then the big publishers will just make more games that people who don't hate ads like (Bejeweled-7 and The Sims 19).
I don't know much about marketing, but I wonder if this is the reason why 99% of all broadcast TV sucks (too hard to advertise to people who like smart TV).
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The study is bullshit, as they always are (Score:3, Insightful)
As ususal, whether the ad nags depends on the ad (Score:2)
An intrusive ad is a negative experience. Now, with more and more brands trying to sell with the "feel good" message instead of trying to convince you they're the better product (i.e. the "value" you get from us is based on you being cooler and better, or just that we make you feel better than the competition), it is outright
Re:As ususal, whether the ad nags depends on the a (Score:3, Insightful)
What these compan
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There could be a derelict movie
WipEout (Score:2)
Did it work? Hell yes. I mail ordered some Red Bull before it was commonly available in the USA, because I was intrigued to find out what it was, and the game was so cool.
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Note: Don't drink 10 cans a day on a regular base. Your life will SUCK if you run out of it.
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Actually work (Score:2)
Next: AdBlock for games (Score:2)
Ads in games worked for about five minutes when it all first started. The first Tony Hawk's game had a descent soundtrack, with interesting and less well known bands that suited the game. The last FIFA/Need For Speed games had a load of manufactur
NWN Product Placement (Score:3, Funny)
Spam. (Score:2)
In other words, you don't matter, because even if your attitude was the usual one, they probably need less than 1% of the people looking at these ads to respond in order to justify what it's costing them.
Now, what does work is, boycotting the game. Here, if they sell 20% less copies, or 50% less copies, even if the other 50% are buying Coke/Pepsi/BonziBuddy/Viagra/whatever like mad, the game company itself might decide to stop selling ads -- whereas even if your method worked,
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Now with the US dollar in free-fall, we're close to 0.90 US but our games are still at $100, meaning we're paying US $90 for a game.
I guess the importers are keeping the profit from the US dollar tanking, whereas that in theory should be passed onto consumers.
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Fortunately, the UK are just 'round the corner, and while the GBP didn't change much towards the EUR (still about 0.6:1, while being about 2:1 to the USD), surprisingly there games can be dirt cheap (got current games from play.com for about 30-40 EUR, compared to the 50-60 they cost here a significant difference).
Why should globalization only wo
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