The full report hasn’t been completed but preliminary findings of a study funded by a gaming ad-network, NeoEdge found that ads posted in video games do a pretty darn good job of getting users’ attention and sticking to their brains. Let’s keep in mind that the study was funded by a company that could gain from all of you believing that video game advertising works. Still, you should be paying attention to this medium.
Via TechCrunch:
“According to Vicki Cohen, Executive Vice-President at Frank Magid Associates, the preliminary results show a 5x increase in unaided brand awareness over TV advertising where a game included a Zappos.com ad. Other key findings…over 80% correctly linked Zappos.com as the advertiser who “allowed them to play the game for free” (who knew gamers were such a grateful lot?), while 56% had a more favorable impression of Zappos.com because of their trade-off of watching an ad for free game play.”
We are firm believers that gaming should rank higher in your modicum of “valuable media” if for no other reason than people will spend millions of hours this year interacting with the virtual worlds of Halo 3 and Wii Bowl and damnit that’s valuable especially when you can give away free things as incentives for users to participate with your ads. And that’s it!
Look these are tough times and XBOX 360 games cost like, $60. So why not plug your sh*t into Microsoft’s network and come up with some crazy scheme where a user spends 10 minutes looking at your client’s thingymabob and in return they get a 20% off coupon for “Girls Gone Wild” the video game?
Like we said, it doesn’t pay to believe this study if you’re concerned about the fact that a video game ad network sponsored it. But it does pay to use logic, skip the study and realize that there’s probably valuable metrics to be had within the video game world. And metrics lead to the money, so follow them and go make some. We’re going to play some games.