Advertising

Got game

Jun 7th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Inserting advertisements into video games holds much promise

THEY are known to television executives as the “Lost Boys”—the generation of video-gaming young men who are watching less television and, thanks to ad-skipping technologies such as TiVo, even fewer advertisements. The obvious response is to start putting advertisements into games instead, by incorporating billboards into the game environment, for example. But incorporating static advertisements into games is unsatisfactory. Now that most PCs and a growing number of games consoles are connected to the internet, however, it is possible to update advertisements when required. As a result, static in-game advertisements are now giving way to dynamic adverts, which accounted for $26m of the $76m spent on in-game advertising last year, and will account for 55% of the $182m spent this year, says the Yankee Group, a consultancy.

Vertical search-engines

Know your subject

Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Topic-specific search-engines hope to challenge Google, at least in some areas

ARE you a generalist or a specialist? The question can be asked of people, but it is increasingly being asked about internet search-engines, as specialist or “vertical” sites take on generalists such as Yahoo! and Google. Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. “They own that market,” says Charlene Li of Forrester, a consultancy.

This is due in large part to GlobalSpec's definable customer base. Its knowledge about the needs of its users sets it apart from the generalist search-engines, says Angela Hribar of GlobalSpec. Vertical sites, which serve up search results from a carefully selected group of topic-specific websites, can also target advertising at particular audiences more precisely...

What do we want from video on the web?

Over the past week I have posted quite a bit of video to my blog.

Some of the video that I posted were in the form of vquences - mashed up thin slices of content - with fairly random themes - and some were full videos of pieces of content that I thought it would be good to share.

The ability to share, or socialize, video and to do it rapidly, seems to me to be in the process of becoming a serious part of internet activity. OK, I know this is not new. That is not the point. It is about our desire to share extremely rapidly.

Videos happen to be an extremely efficient way to transmit memes - idea viruses.

Now what we  want is to be able to have the water cooler conversations that we used to have about the latest Seinfeld episode, about the hottest new video on YouTube. It may also be that the hottest new video on YT was also the hot piece of programming that was on network TV last night - something from John Stewart's Daily Show, a piece of footage shot on a mobile phone of the latest shooting at a US high school, a bomb going off in Baghdad or Tel Aviv...

These water cooler conversations are what enables all profitable media organizations to stay profitable. Because they maintain and grow the consumer engagement with the core media brand.

We also know that video on a web site makes that site much more sticky. I heard the other day at the Future Of Media conference that the CNet game site, Gamespot, gets user engagements averaging over 2 hours per visitor! I understand that YouTube's time of engagement runs out to about 20 minutes per viewer. Big numbers.

Since all of us have a finite amount of discretionary time, one would have to deduce that the impact of video on traditional media web sites must be huge.

So it is not surprising that they are rushing to include video in their offerings.

What they havent figured out yet, for the most part, I believe, is that there is no universal panacea in just putting video onto a web page.

The real answer in building an ongoing value in the relationship between media brand and consumer is to give the consumer the tools that will enable him or her to instantly share a video with his or her network of friends. An automatic alert that enables the meme to connect as rapidly as possible. And for the meme to be branded to the media outlet, regardless of where the underlying content comes from (or is hosted).

Surely the delivery of a service that provides this solves the pain of the consumer/user and the media brand?

However, it also raises huge questions about ownership of the underlying content, attaching a new brand to that content etc....

I am at the Future Exploration Network conference today, which is taking place in Sydney and San Francisco simultaneously.

Check out the blog here. Some very interesting discussion about social media and business models during the morning session.

Here is an article I wrote for a new online magazine called The Marketing Leaders about business ecosystems and online video search.

Sometime, somehow, somewhere during the last ten years we reached and crossed a tipping point. We individualised communications on a global scale. Now, the past is dead. It just remains to be buried. But why?

Two-way conversations have broken out. Web 2.0 is the foundation of our new order. In a swift and continuing evolution, the internet’s progress in realising the promise of the nineties has been stunning.....