Activision and Nielsen team up for in-game advertising push

Publisher Activision is working with advertising industry specialists Nielsen to promote in-game advertising, with the two companies planning to supply new tools to advertisers to help them measure the impact of the new medium.

The firms' objective is to provide standard ways of measuring factors ranging from ad exposure and demographics to audience recall - all areas which are poorly explored in the in-game advertising arena, despite the strong growth predictions for the sector.

In launching their new collaboration, the companies also unveiled Nielsen's latest research into the demographics of the games industry's customers in North America, which focused on a representative sample of males between the age of eight and 34.

Although the remit of the study was somewhat narrow, its findings will make for encouraging reading for proponents of in-game advertising - albeit rather more worrying ones for those involved in the TV advertising industry.

As long predicted, the increasing popularity of gaming is having a negative impact on time spent watching TV, with videogame players aged between 18 and 34 watching a measurably smaller amount of TV than their non-gaming counterparts.

The effect is less pronounced in younger gamers, with TV viewership among 8 to 17 year old males unaffected by gaming habits - although this may be due to a number of factors such as the more pervasive nature of gaming among boys of this age group, or the proliferation of game and TV crossover series such as Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh!

"The video game industry is one of today's fastest growing entertainment businesses today, and videogames will soon be as mainstream an advertising medium as television," explained Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. "Given the tremendous popularity of the medium, we wanted to take a leadership position in generating a standardized method to measure advertising metrics in video games. Additionally, the need for a metric to measure in-game advertising is particularly great as we are beginning to see older male gamers 18-34 defect from TV."

The full text of the report, titled "Video Game Habits: A Comprehensive Examination of Gamer Demographics and Behavior in U.S. Television Households", is available directly from Nielsen Entertainment.