I have a guilty pleasure. I like to play games. Ever since I was a little geek, I liked games, and those adolescent thrills are still there. My personal favorite right now is City of Heroes. It lets me exercise my latent superhero yearnings by flying around a virtual online metropolis using superpowers to stop the bad guys and their evil plots.
It’s incredibly addictive, all the more so because when I log into the game, I am joined by hundreds of fellow gamers. We team up to accomplish missions and increase the powers of our super alter egos.
You may think this is a geeky pastime for a grown man (my wife does), but I’m not alone. Sixty percent of Americans play video games. There are over 500,000,000 gamers worldwide (yeah, that’s the right number of zeros). And the average age is not 13, as you might think, but 30. And yes, I’m helping to bring that average up, but actually over 20% of active gamers are 40 or older.
And it’s not just guys. Women are gaming, too, in increasing numbers. In fact, 43% of gamers are women. The types of games that men and women prefer are different. Where male gamers go for sports and action games, women gamers typically go for casual games, such as puzzles, word, trivia, board and card games. There are over 100 million female casual game players in the U.S. and 60% of them play every day.
All these people spending all this time playing games is starting to attract the attention of advertisers. In the last year, new ad networks have emerged giving advertisers the ability to reach out to gamers in and around the games they play. The opportunities to reach and interact with gamers are as unlimited as the virtual playgrounds we inhabit.
To date, much of what advertisers have brought to this space amounts to virtual outdoor advertising. Just like the early days of the Web, when advertisers posted brochures online and called them web sites, advertisers are taking static outdoor creative and slapping them on in-game billboards. Sure, it’s a start, but we can do so much better.
Advertisers need to add value to the games in order to win admiration from the gamers who reside in them. We need to understand the environments and the community within each game and provide enhancements that the community will appreciate. “How?” you ask. Good question. Let’s talk and figure it out together for your brand.
