Interviews// IGA Worldwide - The Future of In-Game Advertising

SPOnG: Aside from the major, well-recognised brands – with the accompanying big-bucks marketing budgets – what about smaller, more edgy brands that might want to get into videogames? What, if any, are the more affordable solutions for them?

Ed Bartlett: We've already done some pretty cool stuff actually. We did Montana Cans - a specialist graffiti spray-paint brand, who don't really have the kind of budgets that T-mobile does for example. We did a deal with them for B-Boy from Sony. They provided a lot of graffiti, which appeared in the background, and supplied some paint for events and competitions that Sony were doing and that was pretty much a pure co-promotion deal. There is a certain type of game and a certain type of brand where the brand adds credibility to the game and vice-versa. Again they're not the mainstream deals but there is some pretty cool stuff that can be done. Typically those deals are done directly from the publisher to the brand because they tend to be reciprocal and mutually beneficial to both game and brand.

SPOnG: Moving onto 'online' - You recently announced the major deal with Valve’s Counter-Strike – the world’s most popular online action game with millions of users generating in excess of five billion player minutes a month…can you tell us more about your plans for Counter-Strike?

Ed Bartlett: Counter-Strike is almost a channel in its own right. It generates so many impressions and views and has such a dedicated audience that it is practically a sport. This fits very well with advertisers and with our model, the demographic also fits very well with our advertisers. In terms of the content it will be purely dynamic bill-boards again in very select and specific places. That's all there really is to say, nothing new and unique in there, it is purely the ability to add some more content.

The good thing about it is that people play [the same maps] over and over, so this is a way for us to keep those environments looking fresh. In six months time you will see content in there which is new and localised, it keeps it targeted to people. We will also look at clan messaging and competitions and that sort of thing. We've already been doing that sort of thing with Battlefield 2142, so we can promote a clan's server, which is pretty cool.

SPOnG: Next up, 'social gaming' - Can you outline the recent deal with Acclaim in this area in a little more detail for us?

Ed Bartlett: We have six Acclaim games; we have dance mat games, karaoke games through to hardcore RPG fantasy games like 2 Moons. As these games are being supplied for free there’s more room to be able to do things that maybe you wouldn't do if it was a retail game. These are fully produced games, fully featured, retail quality games being offered for free because they are ad-funded. We are also looking at things like being able to give people experience points for accepting viewing ads, that kind of thing. So it's a very different model to the rest of our network.

SPOnG: The future – taking a cue from William Gibson’s last book – Pattern Recognition – might we see ‘cool-hunters’ employed WITHIN online worlds to report back on what is cool on the (virtual) ground to you/ potential advertisers…?

Ed Bartlett: The future's already here! (laughs)... We already have people doing that stuff. If we go back 10 years we had trainer manufacturers and they were recruiting a team of 'cool hunters' if you want to call them that who would go and spot the latest trends on the street. (laughs)..."on da street"...

Look at things like Second Life for example and Habbo Hotel and those kinds of things... it tends to be more social games so far that have got that level of consciousness about them. You will start to see that sort of thing happening in retail games. I think once you've got a bigger network with things like PS3 that will happen more. But for social games, in things like Second Life it already does happen.

Other than that it's going to be more of the same but done in a more refined way. This is the first year the ad industry has had a dedicated budget for this sector, we've already got some companies dedicating six or seven figure budgets which is going to promote the market significantly as we have had around 40% growth this year.

By the end of the decade anything the in-game advertising industry is going to be worth anything between £800 million to $2 billion annually. Certainly a billion per annum by 2010 is reachable, whereas at the moment we are at something like $350 million a year. The predicted rate of growth for the in-game advertising industry is pretty astounding!


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