Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

Big media companies see big money in “in game” advertising. No, not THAT kind of “in game” ads. Microsoft, AOL, Google and the gang have been buying up video game developers and making advertising deals faster than Peyton Manning runs the two minute drill. I wonder what Yahoo! is thinking?

Why the rush to grab up real estate and talent for video games? Why else? Money. Video games offer advertisers ways to reach consumers when they’re “engaged” in an activity. The sales pitch for advertisers will focus on this “engagement” as a key reason why video games are such valuable advertising real estate. Whereas TV viewers are passively sitting back in their lounge chairs, gamers are leaning forward into their activity, and thus are perceived to be more likely to notice the ads.

In addition to in-game ads for console games (like Playstation and XBox), new advertising opportunities are popping up inside “on-line” games. CNet had a nice article recently about the growing “casual” on-line game market. (Read it here).

Quotes from the Article:

“The gamer is actually a much more of a mainstream consumer than you may think,” said Shar VanBoskirk, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. “Consumers are really filtering out advertiser messages, and games are one way that they’re actually still engaged.”

“Within AOL, games is only second to e-mail and IM as far as time spent per user, so you’re talking about a very highly engaged audience,” Ralph Rivera, VP AOL games said. “Any time you have a highly engaged audience, you have advertisers who are looking to get in front of that audience.”

Here at the Colts we’ve begun to dabble with casual games. We think our fans will like playing these games with their friends, especially once we launch our upcoming social networking site.

Here’s an example of a casual game, modified with Colts graphics (from Bunchball).

More on Bunchball

So far (first 2 weeks) we’ve seen about 40,000 page views in our gaming section. We have two games available: matching and trivia. Both are Colts themed and they are getting about the same amount of play. We’re working with Bunchball, tinkering with ways to promote the games… Right now we’ve got some banner ads in rotation as well as a “content” feature on our home page.

One interesting thing I just noticed…take a look at this graph which shows how page views inside the game section have trended over the past 2 weeks. You see the red dot? That’s our AFC Championship game which took place last Sunday. Notice how the trend line for the games peaks prior to the game (on Saturday).

This is interesting because Saturday is typically not our busiest day. In fact, site traffic is typically quite high on game day (Sunday) and spikes to its hightest point on Monday, the day after the game. The fact that our games section shows its highest viewership on Saturday is not surprising, but it is encouraging. Anything that can engage our fans and drive page views during our “off hours” is a welcome addition to the site.

Now we need to figure out why we’re not attracting even more fans to play the games so that we can demonstrate the value of this content section to advertisers.

Why aren’t we seeing faster adoption? It could be that fans don’t quite know how to play, or they’re not interested, or they are simply too engaged with real football stuff, like the Super Bowl, to spend time playing games right now. This is an experiment, a scouting session if you will. We will used these next few weeks to learn as much as we can about how Colts fans play games online.