Game Advertising Conference Wrap-Up

The "Advertising in Games - West" conference just ended in San Franscisco. Gamasutra has a nice wrap-up:

"The only real unanswered question is what future there can be for marketing in an unusually personal space, patently not designed with marketing in mind. The growth statistics cited are tenuous, as are advance audience studies – especially given the general consensus at how darned annoying ads are. It seems like there's a lot of research to do before this field can make much progress."


"Julie Shumaker of EA explained that as far as EA was concerned, advertising was not a way to offset development costs. EA isn't in the business of offsetting costs; EA is in the business of increasing revenue. And as far as she was concerned, in-game marketing isn't close to "real" yet. A $30 million business is not a real business in 2005."

Yahoo Tests AdSense Alternative

So, Yahoo is beta-testing a self-publishing advertising service that would work like Google's AdSense, which can only mean you will see more ads on the sidebars of this and many other blogs.

On a related note, Wired runs an interesting piece about what looks like a logical extension of the search marketing. "The average web surfer spends less than 5 percent of his time using a search engine. That means Google earns almost $3 billion a year from people who devote 95 percent of their time on the internet to doing something else. This is where Roy Shkedi, an engineer and chief executive officer of New York behavioral-marketing firm AlmondNet, comes in. He has patented an idea that he believes could bring tightly targeted advertising to the remaining 80 percent of our time online when we are not searching or shopping."

Yahoo Tests Audio Search

The new audio search that apparently used voice recognition to index audio files, is "available at audio.search.yahoo.com, allows users to comb through more than 50 million music, voice, and other files for free. All you need to do is punch in words or phrases, say, of a song. You are then given a list of audio files that you can click on and play."
--PC World

TiVo Launches Banner Ads

The word is, TiVo has launched the ads (announced last year) that appear on screen in fast-forward mode.

Advertising on Hangers

The ingenious guys at Hanger Network supply dry cleaners with free paperboard hangers that are then handed over to customers along with pressed shirts. Hangers have advertising printed on both sides.

Manhole Advertising

Haven't witnessed it in action myself, but Bayer is making some special plastic material called Makrolon which can be successfully used to cover urban manholes with advertising messages.
Also, here's a rug that looks like manhole cover, a collection of Japanese manhole cover designs, and a story about a town of Vail that sells branded 52-pound covers as souvenirs.

Band-Aid Advertising

This was posted on Halfbakery, like, four years ago, but I don't think it has been done yet. "Imagine the details of a new movie covering the abrasion on your forehead after you fell down the stairs. Hospitals would earn revenue from affixing display plaques onto broken arm casts, advertising some brand of new pharmaceutical drug etc."

The image above is of a fridge magnet you can get here.

Musical Roads

This is half-year old, but I file it anyway in case not everybody reads geek sites and because it's a slow news day.

"Japan has already dabbled here and there with road surfaces that keep drivers awake by using appropriately-placed troughs to play rhythms through your tires. Now the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has gone a step further, with grooved sections of road that boom a melody up through your car. The grooves are a few millimetres deep and 6-12 mm wide; unsurprisingly, the closer they're grouped together the higher the pitch of the note produced. They're planning to use different melodies for different areas, picking songs that have some association to the locale."
--dottocomu

I wonder if you could sponsor a slice of road and have it play your corporate tune.

Guardian: TV Ads Have Future

Guardian (get username/pass here): "The death of the 30-second television advert has been greatly exaggerated, according to a report showing that TV viewers using ad-avoidance technology still boast impressive levels of advertising awareness."

Major points:

• The new TV is all about engagement, and consumers will only give time to ads that are relevant to them.


• PVR use will help some advertisers because they bust through advertising clutter and help viewers remember the adverts they do see.


• In the PVR future, adverts for some categories of products are a far bigger turn-off for television viewers than others. Starcom tested 60 adverts to measure the drop in advertisement awareness in Sky+ homes compared with Sky Digital homes (more about the study)
  

-- via Adverblog

Calculators as Gaming Platforms

If you are considering your in-game advertising options (and here's a new article on the subject from Red Herring), don't forget an often neglected but apparently wildly popular gaming platform - calculators. The web is abuzz today about a recent adaptation of Wolfenstein 3D for TI, and it is a true 3D, too.