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A L S O_ T O D A Y
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Coming soon to computer games -- advertising
BY JANELLE BROWN | These days every potential surface, from the sky above to the ground below, has been used to peddle products. So it should be no surprise that the computer game screen may be next. As Robert Regular, director of marketing for the ad-technology company Conducent, puts it, "TV, magazines, e-zines -- most of these are publicly free to the consumer, and advertising supported. The model is as old as God itself. That same concept is now being lent to a new medium that is becoming as predominant as TV: The computer." Conducent, a 3-year-old start-up, has announced that its technology will soon enable advertising within the play of any kind of computer game. And Conducent isn't the only company that's looking at stuffing advertising into computer games, as game publishers eye new ways to support the rising cost of game development. Whether gamers will want product pitches to interrupt their blissful battles, however, is another question. Ads aren't totally new to gaming -- online games, especially, have long supplemented their meager revenues with banner ads. You'll find unobtrusive banner ads in the entryways and chat rooms of online multiplayer games and networks like Blizzard and MPlayer (although you won't find them in the game itself, because they would slow down game play too much). Advertisements also occasionally appear directly within online games themselves, usually slower-paced games like Bingo or online game shows -- the best-known being the elaborate "interstitial" ads that appear between rounds of the quiz game You Don't Know Jack. Conducent will be following in the footsteps of You Don't Know Jack, enabling interstitials and oversized banner ads to pop up at the beginning or end of games, between game levels or even interrupting game play. The technology to enable ads will be built into the games themselves by the game publishers, and ads will be automatically refreshed and updated any time the gamer goes online. A click on an ad in a game would launch a Net connection or lead the gamer to an e-commerce Web site. Although the ads will be sold by a third party (the Imagine Games Network is currently signed on to do ad sales), the publishers of the games will also be allotted some of the ad space for their own promotional uses. The revenue will be split between the games' publishers and distributors, Conducent and the ad representatives. Conducent is no stranger to ads in games: Before reinventing itself as an ad-technology company, Conducent produced an ad-supported online game called WarSport, though it realized only minor success. Regular says the company has already signed on a slate of major game publishers who will be announced at the E3 gaming conference in May. Eidos Interactive is the first company to publicly associate itself with Conducent, although it hasn't "officially" signed on as a partner yet. Eidos product manager Gary Keith says it will likely start testing out the Conducent system with demo versions of its games in upcoming months. Why is Eidos interested in putting ads in its games? Explains Keith, "We could cross-sell other games, or market other promotions, or pre-sell the final version. It's another vehicle that allows us to put something in front of the consumer." N E X T_P A G E .|. Could ads bring down the high price of games? |
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