Game on

The advertising potential of the gaming market has barely been scratched, says Paul Milsom. First, the industry needs more accurate research

Gaming is not what it was. In today's Britain, as many as two-fifths of adults either have a videogame console at home or have played games online. Such exponential growth in the market is driving – and being driven by – the development of new interactive entertainment titles such as Nintendo's Brain Training, which will further broaden the profile of gamers.

The huge growth of online gaming and ad-serving technology has therefore opened up advertising opportunities that go beyond simple brand tie-ins and in-game product placements. Indeed, marketers are increasingly seeing games as a powerful advertising medium.

But games publishers and advertisers need to understand what works and what doesn't; how gamers feel about in-game advertising; and who's playing, when and what. To do that, they need research. The question is, however, whether the research industry is up to the challenge of measuring a medium in which no two consumer experiences are ever truly the same.


Console yourself
Globally, computer-based games earn $25bn (£13.25bn), a figure set to rise to $55bn (£29bn) by 2009, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers. However, given the vast sums required to develop new games – typically $5m (£2.65m) but stretching to $20m (£10.5m) – new revenues from advertising will be vital.

There are many types of videogame-related ad formats and they evolve continuously. For example, in-game advertising, such as appears around a football pitch or race track, can improve the realism of a game; two-fifths of 16-44-year-old gamers say that this type of brand exposure adds to their gaming experience. And the value to the advertisers can now be greatly enhanced because online networks, like IGA Worldwide, are able to serve adverts dynamically into games. This enables in-game advertising to form a part of a broader cross-media campaign.


A place in the sun
Product placement works in this market, too, in much the same way as it does in films and TV – but with the additional and significant benefit that the product can be interacted with, thus making the brand impression far richer. In 1999, Lara Croft drank Lucozade for an energy boost. This year, games publisher Codemasters launched TOCA Race Driver 3 with an option to race in the new Honda Civic.

But brands can also provide a greater level of sponsorship of a game and be more integral to its narrative. Orange has done this to great effect in Stoked Rider, a boarding game, as has Red Bull in a motorbike-racing game. In the Red Bull example, fast lap times were rewarded with Red Bull, which ultimately earned the gamer an extra level of play.

There are also 'advergames', which tend to offer a lower level gaming experience for the player – and therefore a more short-lived impact for the brand – but which can still offer something of value in the right circumstances. But many other opportunities to reach eyeballs exist, too, such as the screens that appear whilst a gaming is loading, or the gateways that gamers pass through to play online.


The numbers game
There is no doubt, then, that marketers are right to take notice. As for the gamers, almost three-fifths (56 per cent) of those aged 16-44 say they have noticed advertising in games. But that is not surprising given the level of engagement that this medium achieves: over a tenth of online gamers (1.2 million adults) play for more than 20 hours per month. Indeed, figures from the US suggest that some games can take up to 200 hours of playing to complete and can still sell five million copies. This means that 1 billion 'eyeball hours' per title is possible. By comparison, in 2004, The Sopranos was estimated to have achieved almost 1.5 million eyeball hours.

As with any advertising media proposition, there are two key requirements for success; gaining audience and demonstrating the audience to advertisers. Research is already helping game publishers achieve audience share in the same way that it does with other consumer goods: researching usage and awareness, pricing, new product development and communications strategy. And there are, for instance, syndicated tracking studies that deliver brand tracking measures of the major game titles. But qualitative techniques will also be increasingly important for exploring issues like usability and playability.


Older and wiser
Existing research on users shows that the audience is growing and broadening demographically. According to BMRB's TGI.Net service, more than 13 million GB adults have a games console at home and almost 10 million play games online. Amongst the online game players, 4.6 million are women and 2.2 million are aged over 45.

They are no more likely than average to be social grade ABC1 but they are 20 per cent more likely to fall into the top three-fifths of the population in terms of socio-economic level (SEL), taking into account factors like income and ownership of white goods. They are also 20 per cent more likely to be parents or guardians of children aged 11 or under.


Mouth to mouth
Research can also say a lot already about how to communicate to gamers. Gamers, for instance, disproportionately think of themselves as 'TV addicts' (21 per cent more likely than all adults as a whole). But their hours of TV viewing are in fact similar to the GB average, as is their commercial radio listening.

They are also 20 per cent more likely to read more than four magazines a month, but are 26 per cent more likely to read The Sun and 40 per cent less likely to read The Daily Telegraph. More dramatically, they are 69% more likely to go to the cinema at least once a month; indeed, the strength of the relationship between Hollywood and gaming is evident in the cross-over between titles.

Interestingly, online gamers have a disproportionately high claim to generating word of mouth, too. They are much more likely than average to say they have talked to many different people about certain types of product in the past 12 months, including clothes (61 per cent), toiletries (64 per cent) and mobiles phones (76 per cent). This is a further reason why they are an attractive audience to reach.


Measure for measure
From the advertisers' viewpoint, there is no audience except that which has been measured by a credible source. Advertisers, and the media agencies they appoint, will require three broad types of research information to convince them to switch. Meanwhile, the media owners – that is, the games publishers – will require all three in order to make their sales case.

Firstly, they will need a count of the units of games sold. This is the equivalent of the number of newspapers sold provided by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC). For online gaming, this measure is likely to be provided by web-based metrics, similar to the unique-user measure for website traffic as audited by ABC Electronic.

This is an important starting point but it cannot take account of the number of players per game sold or the description of who the players are. Online gamers can be asked to register their details but this will not always be appropriate, reliable or sufficient.


Currency speculation
Secondly, demographic profiling of the audience will be essential in order for the advertiser to incorporate the interactive entertainment into a campaign. For most media this type of information forms the essential trading currency on which media inventory is bought and sold. In the press world, for example, this is delivered by the National Readership Survey (NRS). Face-to-face interviews are conducted among a robust and representative sample.

In gaming, however, it remains to be seen how this type of information will be delivered. One possible solution is be a global audience panel, which would most likely be based on a representative panel of people whose game playing is recorded electronically – and therefore not based on recall. The panellists would complete a profiling questionnaire when they join the panel so that their detailed online behaviour can be analysed by demographic classifications.


Getting a life
Thirdly, decision making on media channels can be considerably enhanced by the addition of lifestyle information about the audience. By planning on consumers' attitudes, product and brand consumption, media agencies are able to deliver greater value to their clients.

One source of such information for all media, including gaming platforms, is BMRB's Target Group Index (TGI). Its research is questionnaire-based, relying on large sample sizes to be able to deliver robust information on narrowly defined target groupsl indeed, it has a sample size of over 700,000 across more than 50 countries.


Compare and contrast
The benefit of this media-neutral approach is that the gaming audience can be compared side by side to the audience of internet, broadcast, press, cinema, outdoor and ambient media. Each industry survey must necessarily research only the media it is designed to measure in order to include the required breadth. The use of the industry surveys on their own therefore makes comparisons between media very difficult, although the IPA's TouchPoints Survey is one media-industry attempt to allow cross-media comparisons to be made more readily. Consequently, there is a huge barrier for any new advertising medium which needs to be assessed alongside its competitors.

This has certainly been the case with the internet. The fact that internet advertising has taken ten years to get where it is now – with 8 per cent of UK advertising spend – shows that the bulk of media planning is inherently conservative. Of course, there are pioneering agencies and brands utilising interactive entertainment at present, but the really big spenders will require robust evidence to be provided by media neutral research.

Beyond the media measurement, advertising research will be required to demonstrate the effectiveness of individual campaigns. Qualitative techniques will therefore become very important. While the quantitative research will count the 'opportunities to see' and advertising recall, the qualitative research will help to understand the richness of these opportunities and the likelihood that videogame advertising will change purchasing behaviour.


Platform souls
The challenges for researchers, then, are enormous. Gaming is split across many platforms, each of which would need to be incorporated into a research design. Moreover, the fragmentation achieves epic proportions once you get into the number of games available. Amazon, for example, sells over 2,000 titles. To put that in context, the NRS manages to include almost 300 publications in its questionnaire – and that is a significant achievement. In any given year there are likely to be between 50 and 100 game titles that will require audience measurement, but they will change year on year, as with cinema audience research.

Furthermore, even people playing the same game will have very different experiences, perhaps choosing their own character, equipment, location and strategy. Measuring ad recall is further complicated by the fact that there are many advertising formats, and it would be unreasonable perhaps to assume that respondents can distinguish between them. For researchers, the craft research skills will be as important as ever, while new creative approaches will also be required.

The interactive entertainment industry is beginning to embrace research in order to develop its products and market them to consumers and brand owners, and the explosive growth in audience will certainly attract new advertising revenue. But for gaming to earn its rightful slice of advertising investment, credible research on traffic, demography and lifestyle will all be essential.


Paul Milsom is a senior associate director at BMRB

June | 2006