How do you measure the effectiveness of your in-game ad investment?
Do you need to know accurate performance and brand engagement metrics?
It is not just about brand awareness or brand recall anymore, the new era of digital innovation provides us with an array of rich media to communicate with the increasingly cynical consumer. Games offer a huge untapped market with a broader profile than typically assumed. 59% of the UK population (26.5million) are gamers and 45% of those are women! Playing games is not just a nerdy boy thing anymore.
The gaming environment offers a unique and broad advertising medium that offers the opportunity to develop tools that add value to the gaming experience and also new creative opportunity. Moreover, it offers the ability to develop bespoke ad campaigns to specific sectors.
The key benefit to a gaming environment is the ability to capture consumer attention. Instead of a diluted environment where consumers are bombarded with irrelevant advertising, games provide a virtual environment where campaigns can be contextually significant, relevant to game content and consequently impacts greater on the player.
Capturing attention, and providing a standardised metric of attention levels has been missing from the industry, until now. What is currently relied upon is number of impressions, CPM’s, play hours and the standard demographics seen across all types of media. This data provides a good starting place, but a more intelligent validation of advertising investment is required.
Shared environments such as games are ‘seen’ in different ways; orientations, spatial contrasts, speed of interaction all result in different individual experiences. Understanding visual attention, and emotive engagement, at a much deeper level of interaction and on a more individualistic basis reveals honest and reliable consumer responses; it elicits consumer feedback that eliminates participant’s often confounding rationale and appeals to a more useful semi-conscious process that explores visceral reactions to game artifacts.
Through our knowledge, experience and original research we have developed an emotive engagement model that can measure, quantify and predict consumer response to advertising in games. In addition to existing measurements being used, we are able to show how consumers respond to brands and in doing so can validate:
- brand persuasiveness
- brand favourability
- brand impact
- brand loyalty
- overall brand effectiveness.
This provides an independent measure on the value of advertising.
Our methodology has grown from our experience with leading brands in the FMCG industry and digital eCommerce. From outdoor advertising, magazine and website advertising through to print, websites, packaging and TV product placement.
The versatility of the methodology means it can be applied to a variety of advertising medium, such as static or dynamic advertising or product placement in console/PC games, mobile and web, and also TV.
At Bunnyfoot we design bespoke research that delivers both quantitative and qualitative results on your advertising campaign. During any stage of the game development cycle, we can apply our research methodology to understand performance and engagement levels of the ad/product placement. At early concept stage, or green light builds, we work closely with the developers to help understand and optimise strategic ad placement. Towards the latter stages of part level builds right up to beta, we can help define, quantify and predict audience engagement and brand behaviour responses.
What does this mean for the industry?
- Game publishers benefit by gaining knowledge to increase the ad value for their franchises going forward
- Game developers gain valuable investment injection
- Advertisers get the chance to develop tools that add value to a gamers experience – brands are much more accepted in games than they are in an interruptive environment – and gain access to targeted market segments
- Agencies gain unique access to accurate measurement tools and new creative opportunity
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