Game On

White Paper Proposal
Intro to Interactive Communications
Trevor Brightman and James McVey
October, 2007


Our White paper will be written by Trevor Brightman and James McVey, graduate students enrolled in the Interactive Communications program at Quinnipiac University.

Problem We feel advertisers are not effectively utilizing the full potential of in-game advertising. There is a large demographic engaged in on-line, networked video games to whom advertisers could reach with real time, streaming advertisement triggered at specific times, relevant to geography, space and time.

Audience This paper will be directed towards the heads of major advertising agencies that are looking for new and cutting edge ways to reach the large and important male demographic of 18-34 year olds, as well as other non-traditional avid gamers.

Key Ideas:
· Our area of study should focus on the advertiser’s developing audience – the multiplayer environment created by networked game consoles.
· Developments in Internet and compression of audio and video technology should allow for real time advertising in networked console gaming in the very near future.
· It is our goal to become experts on this concept, study it in theory, analyze the benefits and risks, and hopefully see it into a working reality.
· In-game advertising is a growing phenomenon. People are spending more time actively engaged in video games, and advertisers are recognizing new and novel ways to reaching these people.
· Our preliminary research has shown advertisers are projected to increase spending in video game advertising like never before, and we intend to provide insight into a new channel through which to deliver their adverts.


Preliminary research sources

Experts in the area In our preliminary research we have found two companies that are leading the way in the field of in-game advertising, and the heads of which we consider experts in the area.

IGA Worldgroup: CCO Darren Herman and CEO Andrew Sispoidis. We feel these two are experts in the field because according to their website their company, IGA “has run static ad campaigns, real-time advertising and dynamic in-game advertisements.” These individuals are leading the way for new technology that is integrated into games, and thus their work will be helpful in our research and writing.

Massive, INC: CEO Mitch Davis has helped develop a video game advertising network and who believes “you want to reach those guys [18-34 year old males] in prime time, there's only one place to do it, and that's video games." His experience, combined with his focus on the importance of target audiences will help us get a pulse of the industry, and give us insights into where it is headed.

Articles, publications, and websites

Some of our most critical research will come from a thesis published in 2006 at LSU which measured player perceptions of advertising in online games. It is important to our research to identify potential pitfalls of placing non-native ads and information into games, and this article provides hard evidence to help us navigate around such pitfalls. An example of a subject matter in this thesis is brand recall by customers and customers attitudes towards in-game advertising.

The magazine and website for Advertising Age appears to be one of the leading industry publications addressing current trends in the business, and will be used in our research for industry news, trends and stats.

Online, the websites gamautra.com will be used to take advantage of their wide selection of news releases and articles that deal with all aspects of video gaming. The Massive Inc, and IGA Worldgroup websites will also be consulted for their data as it relates to implementing advertising campaigns within video games.

Preliminary schedule

Over the next 8 days, Trevor will be looking at pertinent information on industry websites while James will focus on the industry publication and academic journals. We plan to meet twice before the upcoming 10/30 deadline and have our bibliography completed by 10/29. Trevor will be lead author, and other duties will be assigned as we move along. We have also initiated contact with some of our “industry experts” and hope to be in contact with at least one of them before our presentation.