Play to pay: Service inserts ads in games

You've just foiled a terrorist plot to destroy New York and managed to knock off a few dozen evil henchman in the process. And for some strange reason, you have a sudden craving for a Dunkin' Donut.

Be prepared for such moments to become a regular occurrence, thanks to a new service that inserts dynamic ads into video games. After several months of beta testing, New York start-up Massive is set to launch its in-game advertising network on Monday, with support from several major game publishers and mainstream advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Intel.

In-game advertising has become a growing source of revenue for publishers over the past few years, with developers of sports games in particular financing much of their work through product placement fees. Shag a deep fly ball in the latest baseball game, for example, and the outfield fence will probably be emblazoned with paid ads from real companies.

Massive will take advertising to another level by serving up dynamic ads, said Nicholas Longano, chief marketing officer for the Los Angeles-based company. Pass a virtual billboard in the latest "Splinter Cell" counterterrorism game, for example, and it could be hawking soft drinks one day and the latest Vin Diesel movie the next.

"This really opens up the video game publishers to a new category of advertisers," Longano said. "You can communicate about movies opening up this weekend, new television shows."

Developers get to choose when and where an ad would be appropriate. "We don't determine where the ad should go," Longano said. "It's all up to the developer to find a spot where it fits the environment. If you're in somebody's room, you're limited in the ad messages you can deliver, as opposed to if you're in Times Square, with billboards everywhere."

Sensitivity to context is the key to making in-game advertising more than tolerable for game players. Hit the mark, and ads can actually enhance a game by making it seem more realistic, Longano said. "What we keep getting told by all the gamers we survey is that it really ads realism and atmosphere to the games," he said. "As long as you're not interrupting the game, they don't mind."

Massive advertisers pay on a per-impression basis, and the company estimates publishers can squeeze another $1 to $2 of profit out of each copy of a game by using its advertising network, an attractive proposition as future game systems push up development costs.

Massive is limiting its network to PC games for now, but proliferating Internet connections in the living room will allow the service to quickly expand to consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation, Longano said.

"Our objective is to be reaching gamers regardless of the platform," he said.

Yep, wrote about it 5 weeks ago

<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.buzzhit.com/2005/03/placed-product-ad-network-for-games.html" target="_newWindow">http://www.buzzhit.com/2005/03/placed-product-ad-network-for-games.html</a>

ClickZ (from whom I originally heard about it) has solid converage as well...

Indeed, this is old news to me.

I wrote a livejournal topic about it back in October of 2004 when there was just a little "blurb" about this on CNN. I think I'll just copy and paste what I wrote there since my views haven't changed:

"10/27/2004
I found an article regarding a company called Massive, Incorporated who has developed 'in-game advertising' for PC and console games. I suppose it was only a matter of time, but after doing research on the company and the methods they plan to employ (some of which I got from the company themselves in response to a friendly e-mail where I claimed to be a startup gamedev interested in hearing how their system will work), I decided to spend more time gaming on consoles. On the PC, if you play any of the games that support this software (which I call spyware), the game will record, send, recieve and manipulate gamedata behind your back. It'll do the same thing on consoles, but on consoles I get the simple choice of whether I want to hook it up to the internet or not. If I choose not to, they can't deliver any spyware. However, on the PC, even if I disable my internet connection while I play any games using this, it will store the data and send it as soon as an active internet connection is found. If you think it can be disabled, think again: The files to connect, upload and download new ads are going to be tied into almost every facet of the game (textures, executables, etc) which means separating it from the game would be equivalent to disabling the game."