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The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

Study Finds In-Game Ads Work 32

Posted by Zonk from the affecting-young-minds dept.
A study conducted by Nielsen and Activision has concluded that in-game advertising works on the traditional gamer demographic. From the eToyChest article: "The study was conducted among 1350 active male gamers ages 13 to 44. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of nine test or control cells. Respondents who were assigned to four game test cells, featuring the games MTX Motortrax, Tony Hawk's Underground 2, Need For Speed Underground 2 and NHL 2K6, were then exposed to brands and products at various levels of integration and pervasiveness within each game. Participants assigned to two game control cells played the same games without any products integrated or placed in the game. According the study, it confirms earlier findings that product integration helps to drive awareness and recall, but also uncovers a new variable, pervasiveness, which contributes to driving brand awareness as well."
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Study Finds In-Game Ads Work More

Study Finds In-Game Ads Work

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  • Product Placement vs. Blatant Ads (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Monday December 05, 2005 @03:54PM (#14187431) Homepage Journal
    What I find interesting about this study is that it suggests that product placement -- putting brand names into situations where you would expect them to be in the context of the game world -- is effective. Movies and TV have been doing this for years. Remember how every cell phone in The Matrix was Nokia, or the extreme close-up on the Dr. Pepper can when Peter Parker was practicing web shooting in Spider-Man? (And those are relatively recent.)

    By immersing the ads into the gameplay, rather than flashing an advertisement on the side of the screen, the ads simply become part of the atmosphere rather than a punch-the-monkey level annoyance.

    I'd still prefer fewer advertisements in things I'm already paying for -- commercials in movie theaters, previews on DVDs, etc. -- but integrated ads aren't nearly as bad as some of the alternatives.
    • but integrated ads aren't nearly as bad as some of the alternatives.

      It might factor into whether or not something you make is seen as "art" 100 years from now or just schlocky mass-produced crap. Would the Mona Lisa be as famous if you could see a "Mario's Pizza!" sign out the window?
    • Product placement can be overdone though. Take a movie like "The Island." It being a crappy movie aside, the product placements were overbearing and blatant. The examples you site were more subtle because the focus was on the other things going on, and it just happened to be using a Nokia phone or Dr. Pepper can. I just hope that findings such as this doesn't drive more "Island" type placements.
    • Remember how every cell phone in The Matrix was Nokia, or the extreme close-up on the Dr. Pepper can when Peter Parker was practicing web shooting in Spider-Man?

      Actually, I don't remember those at all. I guess product placement works better on you than it does on me. Thank god.

  • ...if a game company that likes money and wants people to pay them for ads says it's true...
    • "At that point, we let the data speak for itself," said Michael Dowling. "To do this, we correlated brand pervasiveness, at each increasing level of integration, with key marketing metrics like awareness, recommendation and ratings. This data-driven, empirically-based analysis revealed a powerful new structure for brand integration."

      I knew it, he's a script [dack.com]! *kicks himself for not knowing earlier*

  • Whoa, stop the presses. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by voice_of_all_reason ( 926702 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @03:57PM (#14187454)
    In other news, Spyware also increases sales and brand awareness. It's still a scummy thing to do.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "in-game advertising works on the traditional gamer demographic. From the eToyChest article: "The study was conducted among 1350 active male gamers ages 13 to 44.""

    What advertising doesn't work on males ages 13 to 44? Success of advertising to that demographic is a big reason why it's such a target demographic.

  • Ads are ads (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Trails ( 629752 )
    I would hazard that the positive response is driven in part by the novelty of in-game ads. I know the first time I saw one in planetside, I stared at it for a bit, to check it out. I suspect this will turn into annoying "background noise" soon enough, and will become as [in]effective as any other form of advertising once the "new car smell" wears off.
  • Studies show that commissioned studies tend to show results that the commissioning party wanted to see as the results.
  • Whenever I read about studies of which advertising method is more effective than such-and-such, I can't help but remember that day my parents dropped me off at a place doing market research so they could shop or something. (*at the time I was pissed that my sister got dropped off at the booth that was trying out new flavors of teddy grahams)

    Now, I couldnt have been more than.. well, I barely know how old I am now, so let's make up the age "six" and pretend I just mean to say "quite young".
    I was shown a few

  • genre specific... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by C0rinthian ( 770164 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @04:31PM (#14187776)
    Anyone else notice that all the test games were sports games? Situations where there is rampant advertising in their real-life equivalents? It's not like product placement isn't expected in those situations.

  • Examples of blatant ads? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cerberus7 ( 66071 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @04:41PM (#14187863)
    How long has blatant product placement been going on? The earliest I can remember is the box of Cherios in Superman. Anybody know of earlier examples, or if maybe there's a list online?
    • Yes, replying to myself... Just in case somebody takes the opportunity to get uppity, I'm not talking about the early radio and TV shows that were owned and produced by some company to advertise their product. I'm talking about the more subtle kind, where the product makes an appearance in the show, but nobody comes right out and says "hey, buy X, because X is good." Some recent examples get pretty close to that, but they don't quite step over that line.
    • I waited months for my secret decoder ring.

      D-R-I-N-K M-O-R-E O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E

      Bastards.
  • I'm not thrilled about in-game advertising, but what WOULD thrill me is the increase in 100% sponsored games. Anarchy Online has adopted this model. You Don't Know Jack Online used this model in its heyday. I'd be glad to endure some ads if it meant I could play a good game for free. The better the game, the less annoyed I'd be with ads. In fact, if the ads are done tastefully, I'd seek those brands out just because they were paying for my video games.

  • One of the reasons I didn't like F.E.A.R.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by afabbro ( 33948 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @05:20PM (#14188306) Homepage
    ...was the in-game ads. All the laptops you found were of a certain brand that displayed the logo. Had they been laptops with a standard Windows desktop, then I could see that as just being realism. But they just had the vendor's logo.

    For $55, there should be a way to turn off in-game ads. I mean, for the love of God, $55 is already ridiculous.

    (Admittedly, I also thought it was a crappy game for many other reasons...in-game ads was just one of the nits further down the list).

    • In addition to other security on my network, I use a software firewall (Kerio) to let me easily monitor which programs try to poke a tendril out over the network. As a matter of course, I deny them access, usually as soon as the installer, lately. :P These are for single-player games, mind you, as I generally will go through the single-player portion of a game before venturing online with it, if at all.

      F.E.A.R.'s computer screens all had either generic "logon"-type screens, or BSODs. While the first roomful

  • Ads in Tony Hawk's (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LKM ( 227954 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @05:58PM (#14188712)

    These games are hardly suited for judging people's acceptance of in-game ads. If I'm playing Tony Hawk's, I obviously expect them to wear clothes from real brands, and have brand-name skateboards. Likewise, I expect real cars and real tuning brands in games like Need for Speed, and I'm not bothered by billboards in sports games because there are billboards in real sport events, too.

    That does not mean that I want to see a coke sign or a Nike ad in a game which is based on a fictional universe.

    • Bingo! product placement is only offensive if it's out of place in the movie or game's "universe." In that regard, I find imaginary products -- or worse, blurred trademarks -- more distracting in movies or games that are supposed to be here and now. Or here in the past or future. One of my favorites was the "product placement" in Demolition Man [imdb.com]. All restaurants have been replaced with Taco Bell. Except in the future it's a white linen tablecloth sort of place with little tiny morsels as the meal. It

  • They work because they are new. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @05:58PM (#14188716) Homepage Journal
    Soon you'll get tired with in-game ads just the same as with the real-world ones. The novelty will end and the effectiveness will drop just to the standard low margins of all ads.
    You, Americans, were brought up in the world of commercials. I lived through fall of "communism" in Poland, and back then there was almost no commercials. And completely no TV commercials. When the first ones showed up on TV, it was all the craze. Everyone was buying the cockroach killer stickers, even if you had no cockroaches, just because it was on TV. Kids were crazy about the Kuku-Ruku candy bar, even if there were many better, tastier, cheaper ones in trade. But this one was in TV commercials. TV commercials were new and cool.
    Then they got boring and started to really piss people off. Just to the degree they do now.

  • I admit it (Score:3, Funny)

    by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Monday December 05, 2005 @07:12PM (#14189387) Homepage Journal
    I wanted to try Red Bull after seeing ads for it in WipeOut XL back in 1996. Took me ages to find some.
  • The company selling the adverts, and a company who people will pay to tell them if the ads are working both say the advertising works. Gee, who woulda thunk it?
  • It was okay with me in Project Gotham Racing when there were ads on the screens in Times Square, because that fit the setting. But when I was playing the second level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory the other day, in-game advertising just pissed me off. The level is a cargo ship controlled by terrorists in the middle of the ocean, and it's a dark and rainy night. Quite atmospheric. And right there at the beginning of the level, on the sides of the crates, are HUGE FUCKING INTEL GAMING ADVERTISEMENTS. They'r

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