Gaming & Marketing

Thomas Miles & Victoria Curro, Planning Directors, Lavender*Feb 2010

sub-culture or cultural phenomenon?

Size of the industry?

• Worth over $70B worldwide

• Is on the verge of eclipsing music and movies as our most popular form of entertainment

• Last year Australians spent a record $2Bn on video games

Who’s playing?• Average age is 30• Most likely university educated• 40% female• 68% of population

Rise of Wii, Wii fit appealing to a new type of gamer

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a genre of computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world.

These are huge.

WoW has over 12,000,000 paid subscribers worldwide

There are psychologists who specialise in-game in MMORPG addiction.

Gen Z or the Internet Generation, are right at home.What will these consumers be like?

Implications for marketers

1. In-game advertising

2. Gaming as marketing

3. Stereotypical gamers are changing

In late 2008 Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear in an in-game advertisement.As seen in Burnout Paradise.

What do gamers think?

Does it work?

• Some headlines:– “500% increase in brand awareness”– “more effective than TV”– “64% felt positively towards the brand”– “33% quite or likely to buy product”

Does it work?

• Massive & CommScore have recently collaborated to measure consumer actions as a result of in-game advertising (in much the same way other digital media is measured– 280% increase in visits to a TV station website vs those not exposed to

the in-game advertising– 125% increase in search queries for a movie rental and 57% increase in

visits to the website– 17% increase in visits to an entertainment site

Gaming as Marketing

& remember - Its not just a guy thing