IGA, Nielsen Partner to Track In-Game Ads

In-game advertising firm IGA Worldwide announced that it has partnered with Nielsen Entertainment to conduct a landmark study of the effectiveness of advertising in videogames.

To produce the new research, which will compiled from June through August of this year, IGA has signed on two top videogame publishers – Electronic Arts and Activision – as well as a pair of Omnicom agencies: Organic and PHD. Nielsen will leverage the company’s BASES online research panels to measure videogame advertising’s ability to impact classic ad effectiveness yardsticks, such as awareness and intent to purchase.

According to IGA CEO Justin Townsend, while most major brands and ad agencies are already sold on the need to somehow engage the huge audience for videogames, they are clamoring for more ammunition to justify spending in the medium. “All the brands and the agencies say ‘we’ll increase budgets, just give us the research,’” he said.

Initially, this study will focus only on high-end retail PC games, rather than games played on major consoles like Sony’s PlayStation or Microsoft’s Xbox. High-end PC games also happen to be IGA’s specialty, as the company has existing partnerships with game developers like Activision to place advertising and product placements into games that are played using an Internet connection.

Yet Townsend emphasized the study’s collaborative nature as key to producing research that would establish new benchmarks for the growing in-game ad market. “You don’t want to do just one-off case studies,” he said. “We don’t want to set the standards based on our own business model but rather what the industry wants. There is so much impartiality here, at the end of the day, its about the results This should be a major event for the industry.”

Chad Stoller, executive director, emerging platforms at Organic, said that he believes that lessons learned from this research should be applicable for videogame advertising across the board. “There are a lot of players in this particular study,” he said. “It’s very collaborative. It’s ok with me that it is focused on PC games. These players tend to move the marketplace.” : Mike Shields - JUNE 19, 2007.