In-Game Ad Updates

Ilya Vedrashko posts some recent finds about In-Game advertising on the MIT Ad Lab blog.

From the post:

"Some of the more interesting stuff I found during the past week of work on my "brands in games" thesis:

-- Today Washington Post runs an article about in-game ads that mentions a new EA's game Fight Night Round 3 that features the Burger King as a sparring partner slash punching bag. Some amusing screenshots here.

-- A small gallery of user-made celebrity avatars from Second Life.

-- The fictional soda brank Sprunk in GTA: San Andreas.

-- A report on the tribute U2 concert in Second Life that has been making rounds on the net."

From the Washington Post article:

"Nielsen Entertainment, the television tracking firm, has started to follow such advertising and estimates this will be a $75 million market in the United States this year and will grow to $1 billion by 2010.

Nielsen studies have shown that gamers tend to remember products that they see prominently placed in games, but the in-game advertising business has been set back by the lack of a standardized way to measure the impressions that are made by an ad in one of their products.

"The media-planning environment can't operate without a standard metric," said Michael Dowling, general manager of Nielsen Interactive Entertainment. "That's what we're trying to produce."