89% of UK households with children have a games console, and 80% of those who play video games are aged 15 to 44. Further studies show that 40% of people who view ads in games are more likely to buy the advertised product.
Now, what I have been thinking is that gaming by its very nature is immersive, a form of engagement.
Does this suggest completely new ways to communicate with your audience? And I do suggest we are going way beyond branded entertainment or yawn, product placement... where the content is the advertising and the advertising is the content, where the advertising is the conversation and the conversation is the advertising. Have I lost you? Read on...
Have a read of this The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One) and Part Two In The society and economics of the virtual kingdom we explore what the potential is within the gaming formats.
Aleks K writing for the Guardian said
The technology represents a new approach for content distribution that may capture the demographic slice that's turning its back on television. The BBC's move signals recognition of the importance of access diversification, and heralds a new phase of public awareness of social virtual worlds.
There is, however, one well-known mechanism that does an amazing job of incentivizing people to think seriously and passionately about a given set of problems. A mechanism that compels people to meaningfully compete, against other people or against themselves, for no monetary benefit whatsoever. That's right – video games.
In 1954, Frederick Pohl , a gifted social satirist and science fiction writer, published the short story, The Tunnel Under the World, which should have been made into a first rate Twilight Zone episode. A man wakes up in bed next to his wife, gets up, and goes to work, and along the way, he starts to sense that there's something subtly different about his world:
He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were most unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.
But no one else seems to have noticed that the entire adscape has changed overnight. And then it happens again, and again, and again. By the end of the story, he discovers that he is living inside a consumer research experiment:
They aren't Russians and they aren't Martians. These people are advertising men! Somehow -- heaven knows how they did it -- they've taken Tylerton over. They've got us, all of us, you and me and twenty or thirty thousand other people -- right under their thumbs. Maybe they hypnotize us and maybe it's something else; but however they do it, what happens is they let us live a day at a time. They pour advertising into us the whole damned day long. And at the end of the day they see what happened -- and then they wash the day out of our minds and start again the next day with different advertising....They test every last detail before they spend a nickle on advertising!
So Jenkins take on this in comparing the nightmare scenario of Pohl's vision is that Second Life is a virtual development of this. "Pohl's short story about this microworld that allows Madison Avenue to run experiments on consumers anticipates the role that brands and advertising will play in new multiplayer game worlds such as Second Life."
So it seems to me, that why would gaming not be the new marketing