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Study Indicates In-Game Ads Actually Work
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Of course an ad agency is going to get a study that says their ads work, even if they had to pay for a dozen first that said they don't.
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".
The enemies of Democracy are
... or cost $10 max. Don't piss me off by putting ads in a game that I paid $40-$50 for. Any in-game ad in an expensive game will make me want to avoid the product they're advertising.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
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.