Can the in-game ad medium become a rival to TV?

Against certain demographic groups, console games account for a huge chunk of leisure attention span - that's well known. What's less well known is that an increasing number of serious advertisers see this as an important advertising environment.

Car manufacturers vie with each other to have their marques tested to destruction in virtual races and chases. That's the most obvious example, but it's not just about cars - it's everything from fast food and drinks to mobile phones. Product placement in video games is becoming a big business.

And now the research company Nielsen Media Research is teaming up with the games publisher Activision to begin the first piece of comprehensive games-audience research. It will be conducted in the US, where Nielsen runs the main television audience measurement panel - and, indeed, a feature of the research is that it will be able to make direct comparisons between TV watching and games playing behaviour in the young male audience.

The growing sophistication of the games business is a driver for this sort of interest from Nielsen, as it demands creative involvement of the advertiser at the basic planning stage of a game. The aim is to embed the brand in such a way as to deliver a fundamental emotional engagement.

Bobby Kotick, Activision's chief executive, comments: "The video games industry is one of the fastest-growing entertainment businesses today and video games will soon be as mainstream an advertising medium as TV. Given the tremendous popularity of the medium, we wanted to take a leadership position in generating a standardised method to measure advertising metrics in video games."

Read the article: www.brandrepublic.com