Interactive marketers gathered at San Francisco's City Club to talk about how games and gamers might alter the future of marketing.
On the evening of September 22, members of SF/Big -- San Francisco's Bay Area Interactive Group -- crowded into the tenth floor ballroom at The City Club to hear Julie Shumaker, Ankarino Lara, Mike Cassidy and Kate Everett-Thorp report on "The Gaming Evolution." Mediasmith CEO Dave Smith moderated the panel.
Why advertising to gamers is a smart idea
Mike Cassidy, CEO of XFire, kicked off the round of presentations with "Videogame industry + interactive marketing = enormous opportunity."
As of 2002, males in the 18- to 34-year-old category played as many hours of videogames as they spent watching TV. Currently, the videogame industry is worth $25 billion, with 110 million players worldwide. Videogames reach 70 percent of males aged 18 to 34.
The question is not whether gaming is a growing industry with a dedicated audience, but how to target these players. Cassidy listed various strategies to access gamers -- advertising on gaming websites, in-game advertising and advertising on gaming community platforms (such as XFire).
How to engage gamers
Kate Everett-Thorp, the president of interactive advertising at AKQA, continued the evening's conversation with her presentation on the gamer profile. As she said, gamers do not fit the widely held stereotype of a pimply, teenage boy. Forty percent of gamers are female, most are employed males, and the average age of a gamer is about 30.
Everett-Thorp noted the different levels of involvement among gamers -- from the hardcore to the enthusiast to the mainstream player (formerly known as the "casual" player). To reach gamers, marketers must evolve their communication plan: don't talk to gamers; let them "own" the advertising; take them on a journey; make sure there's an element of inclusion, and present the campaign as a quest for discovery.
Everett-Thorp referred to the Halo 2 campaign that AKQA launched in 2004 as an example of how to target gamers. Initial Halo 2 pages launched with no English text, as not all gamers are English-speaking. Translating the text so that all gamers, across the globe, could read it would have been too expensive. Instead, AKQA teamed up with Bungie.org, which created a language called Covenant. Within 48 hours of the page launches, some gamers had decoded the language and published a decoder page. By the end of the week, 16 language translations had been published. And this was all before the website even went live.
Everett-Thorp cites this example not only because it was an extremely successful product launch, but also because it demonstrates the energy and capacity of the gaming population. Leverage that population as AKQA did, and you can, as Everett-Thorp said, stretch your budget to the max.
Before concluding her presentation, Everett-Thorp noted that gaming overlaps with music and film. The mainstream audience can be accessed via movie theaters, while the hardcore audience is better targeted online. For the launch of the Xbox 360, AKQA used blogs to create awareness and excitement, along with search engine marketing strategies.
In-game advertising
Julie Shumaker, the national director of videogame advertising sales at EA, then took the stage with news on how the gaming industry has changed over the years -- and how advertising in games has changed accordingly. She recounted how gaming was once too small to be recognized in its own right, and was categorized as part of the toy industry. At that time, gaming companies actually had to pay brands for the rights to use them. Things are different now; this year, in-game advertising is a $120 million business. Primedia Insight sees this figure growing to $800 million by 2009. And it's no wonder that in-gaming advertising is taking off; billboards in games offer a 70 percent rate of brand recall.
The take-away
The evening ended with open Q&A, and a positive note. Everett-Thorp noted that gamers are actually auctioning Warcraft characters on eBay to less sophisticated players for as much as $1,000. The implication is that the appetite and spending power of the gaming population is huge.
Cassidy continued on the theme of untapped opportunity -- noting that while car companies and soft drinks are marketing within games, clothing and alcohol companies are not. Both would do very well in the medium. (He acknowledged that advertising alcohol poses difficulties due to age requirements.)
Everett-Thorp emphasized the versatility and value of the medium to marketers in noting that 20 percent of gamers are not white. This is a great way to reach diverse populations.
One caveat from Ankarino Lara, director, GameSpot, CNET Networks, Inc., this is a very valuable marketing medium; just make sure that the advertising is relevant to the game.
Emma Brownell is an associate editor for iMedia Connection and is also the editor for iMedia's twice-weekly Creative Showcase.