News

In-Game Advertising

13/11/2009
Strong growth expected, for a market worth 1.4 billion euros in 2013
In-Game Advertising

Advertising spending has been cut for all media, except the Internet. According to Laurent Michaud, Project Leader for the  In-Game Advertising report: “Video games continue to be underestimated by advertisers who are reticent about this unfamiliar sector, but we expect to see this trend of under-investment start to disappear by 2010-2011”. 

In-game advertising, or IGA, is a fast-growing market that is expected to increase from 716 million euros globally in 2009 to 1.4 billion euros in 2013 – which means average annual growth of 18.5% during that period. This report, which provides a detailed view of how the market is structured and the strategies being employed by the players, sheds new light on the market’s promising outlook, its inherent challenges and the medium-term growth levers.

Several phenomena are coming together and helping to spur the market’s swift development:

• Advertising spending on video games is catching up. Long held in low regard by most advertisers since it targeted a small niche of consumers, video games are now spreading to the general public.

• The work performed by specialised ad agencies to persuade advertisers and marketing agencies will have an effect in the short term.

• Dynamic in-game advertising offers still largely untapped possibilities in tracking the impact of advertising, real-time profiling of target markets, refreshing ads in real time, etc.

• The viability of CPM measurement tools is crucial to the development of in-game advertising. Even if low-level software standardisation is not yet on the table, everyone agrees that the results of IAB initiatives are promising.

• The top video game publishers are aware that they can earn substantial revenue from in-game ads.

• Massively multiplayer online gaming and games on social networks are the most dynamic advertising segments for games. Despite how diverse this segment is, gamers seem to be less averse to ads than previous generations, provided that they mesh with gameplay as seamlessly as possible.

• Making digital entertainment devices Internet-ready is key to the success of in-game advertising. At the end of 2009, between 70% and 75% of home console owners – or more than 100 million households – are connecting their machine to the Web. IDATE estimates that this figure could increase to over 225 million by 2013.

• 2009 is the year that television entered the era of the Internet, of instant interactivity and graphically enhanced interfaces. The internet-ready TV will host on-demand video game services that will open up an additional advertising window on the small screen, which is an ideal platform for commercials.