This was part of the Get In The Game panel (with Alan Duggan from Nephin Games, Harry Kargman from Kargo, Tammy Robinson from Verizon Wireless, Scott Jensen from mForma and the moderatore was Drew Hull from NPD Group) but when advertainment was mentioned the conversation went on for quite a long time, so I thought it deserved its own post. The gist? There’s a lot of problems, and ad-supported games are no panacea for the industry.
“Today it would be difficult if not impossible to pull off advertainment,” said Harry. “You need to be on the carriers’ deck and if they don’t get a piece of the ad dollar they’d never allow it.” Even if the games weren’t on the carrier deck, if they got wind of a lot of dollars going around without them getting a cut “they wouldn’t like it either”.
“Everyone is really nervous,” said Scott. “When you say advertising and mobile in the same sentence it sends shivers down distributors’ spine.” There are terrible fears of something like spam… He said the second challenge was finding a standardized model, quantifying the value of the ads. There is no standard CPM rate. The third challenge he cited was reaching the critical mass of enough eyeballs to make deal worth it to advertisers. The metrics behind advergaming is also different — the ads would be viewed for less time but they would be (by definition) in closer proximity to the player, so the value of that would have to be determined. The time playing a game is also different — although the games might only be played for a few minutes they are played often. If the games have levels where people can save the game and continue later it is effectively one game. Replayability plays a huge part.
But wait, there’s still more…there are the issues with whether the ad can be changed dynamically or is static within the game. Dynamic is better for the advertisers but it means there are extra data minutes on the customers’ bill.
An audience member said that outside the US companies were interested in being associated with mobile games and other mobile content the way they had previously wanted to be associate with iTunes. Alan responded that if a game was built around a brand and the way that brand is projected in the market you can’t just swap it for another brand…the context would be all wrong.
All in all, everyone thought it would be a great idea but no-one seemed to expect it to happen very soon…
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