Business Marketing as a Game
Most people are familiar with the traditional forms of media advertising; the billboards, the TV advertisements and all forms of web based marketing. Quite recently a new trend has been emerging among advertisers who focus on the 18-34 demographic. Online gaming. This might seem a strange outlet for advertising dollars but recent trends have shown this to be anything but.
In recent years the American games industry has grown to surpass Hollywood as a financial producer and is poised to make even more gains in the coming years. Among the forerunners of this trend is the Blizzard Entertainment title, World of Warcraft, a game that requires a monthly subscription and allows people from around the world to play and quest with each other. Currently World of Warcraft has over ten million subscribers, each one paying $15 a month to play in the online world. What’s this mean? Well for starters this one game generates roughly $150 million dollars; that’s per year. WOW has been running for four years and going strong. Compare that to some of the highest grossing movies, Titanic ($601m) and StarWars (460m) and you can see the public has spoken. They like their games.
Many big name corporations have taken notice of this and started to pursue it. A number of online games have been renting out virtual advertising space as a means of reducing cost. Currently some of the biggest participants that have signed on are Coca-Cola, Comcast's G4TV, Dunkin' Donuts, Universal Music Group and Verizon. Additional advertisers such as Target and Wal-Mart have also shown interest in pursuing online game advertising in the future.
One reason why this form of advertising has picked up is the fact that it’s non conspicuous to viewers. These are not the crudely constructed games of ten or even 5 years ago. Many have come to a point where photo realistically rendered cities and characters are common place. Seeing an advertisement for Coca-Cola on a billboard in a virtual city seems as natural as in a real one.
With more and more companies jumping on board and with hundreds of millions of viewers around the world this is one advertising venue that is unlikely to die down.
- Richard Keene
IT Computer Support of New York
Design and Optimization Department
In recent years the American games industry has grown to surpass Hollywood as a financial producer and is poised to make even more gains in the coming years. Among the forerunners of this trend is the Blizzard Entertainment title, World of Warcraft, a game that requires a monthly subscription and allows people from around the world to play and quest with each other. Currently World of Warcraft has over ten million subscribers, each one paying $15 a month to play in the online world. What’s this mean? Well for starters this one game generates roughly $150 million dollars; that’s per year. WOW has been running for four years and going strong. Compare that to some of the highest grossing movies, Titanic ($601m) and StarWars (460m) and you can see the public has spoken. They like their games.
Many big name corporations have taken notice of this and started to pursue it. A number of online games have been renting out virtual advertising space as a means of reducing cost. Currently some of the biggest participants that have signed on are Coca-Cola, Comcast's G4TV, Dunkin' Donuts, Universal Music Group and Verizon. Additional advertisers such as Target and Wal-Mart have also shown interest in pursuing online game advertising in the future.
One reason why this form of advertising has picked up is the fact that it’s non conspicuous to viewers. These are not the crudely constructed games of ten or even 5 years ago. Many have come to a point where photo realistically rendered cities and characters are common place. Seeing an advertisement for Coca-Cola on a billboard in a virtual city seems as natural as in a real one.
With more and more companies jumping on board and with hundreds of millions of viewers around the world this is one advertising venue that is unlikely to die down.
- Richard Keene
IT Computer Support of New York
Design and Optimization Department
Labels: online marketing
posted by Richard Keene | 8:15 AM
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