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